


Crash and burn

by purplejabberwock



Series: Thy word is a lamp [4]
Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: David | Archer - Freeform, F/F, Florence Nightingale | Berserker - Freeform, Gilgamesh (Fate) Being an Asshole, Hessian Lobo | Avenger - Freeform, Jeanne d'Arc | Ruler - Freeform, M/M, Paracelsus von Hohenheim | Caster, Sherlock Holmes | Ruler - Freeform, St. Martha | Rider - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:14:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 71,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22728973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplejabberwock/pseuds/purplejabberwock
Summary: Romani's back. This should be a good thing. This should be afantasticthing. The problem is, he hadn't expected to be able to come back, and there are unresolved emotions looming. What does one do, when they didn't expect to live? How does one act,afterthe end has come and gone?And then there's the issue of the cambion ... the one who can't seem to stop getting his paws all over Romani's life.
Relationships: Fujimaru Ritsuka/Mash Kyrielight | Shielder, Romani Archaman & Leonardo Da Vinci | Caster, Romani Archaman/Merlin | Caster
Series: Thy word is a lamp [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1486823
Comments: 46
Kudos: 168





	1. When you feel all alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makari Crow (Beanna)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanna/gifts).



> And here is the next instalment! It ... probably isn't the one you all wanted. I seriously thought this would be a short-ish one-shot. 70k words later ...
> 
> Spoilers sort-of up to Salem, in the sense of a certain person, but timeline is still before Agartha. (In the comments section an anonymous crow has some spoilers for an event not yet released in NA.)
> 
> Certain person's name was picked at random. Other creative justifications in the first relevant chapter. Fic and chapter titles from Savage Garden's song of the same name.
> 
> Enjoy!

The first time Romani wakes up in Chaldea — again, that is — he’s not convinced he’s woken up at all. Or that everything that had happened had really, actually, truly happened. Or, maybe, that reality was what he thought it was and this was all some fever dream —

He stares up at the clean simple lines of his room in Chaldea, and for several minutes opts not to move, because moving means discovering the reality of his … reality. For just a little while, he’d like to believe … he’s not sure. That this is real. That he had not dreamed being wanted, being sought out, being rescued …

That, perhaps, he _had_ dreamed all that, and he hadn’t needed to sacrifice himself at all, and everything from Lev being a traitor onward had just been some terrible nightmare …

He mostly has to rouse when Fou’s tongue licks the corner of his eye where tears have gathered, his tongue all raspy and not-quite-enjoyable, and that startles a laugh out of Romani.

“Fooou …”

“Sorry, sorry …

Fou is in his hair.

… Fou is in a _lot_ of his hair.

Fou is in his hair like it hadn’t been, since — since —

Romani’s throat closes up and he shuts his eyes and swallows hard until it sort-of goes away. A little. Ah, so this is what’s real, then.

His chest feels warm, and far too small for the warmth in it, as if he’s going to burst; but the size makes the inflated feeling painful, as if he still has something to grieve, something that makes the balloon far too big.

“You’re being stupid,” he says aloud, to himself and Fou.

“Fou.”

“Not you, me. I’m being stupid. What do I have to grieve _now_ …”

“ _Fou_.”

Romani feels Fou’s paws in his hair, tugging down his hairline, and the insistent lick of a small tongue washing it. He laughs again, harder than before — and more like a sob, too. “That’s going to take you more than a few lifetimes … but I guess you’re right.”

He still feels stupid, when he finally stirs in a nest of hair he had not had when he’d last walked these halls. Fou doesn’t tumble out so much as brace his paws against Romani’s shoulder and cling determinedly to the floof, and continue trying to wash Romani’s hair. Or maybe his face. Fou seems to be alternating.

Romani rubs the eye that Fou isn’t currently attending, and glances first toward the corner where, last night — well, maybe he’d imagined _that_ , he’d been very tired …

There’s still his chair in the corner. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that someone had moved it there before last night, while his room was empty; but when Romani thinks of seeing David’s lithe form there, half curled around a kinnor, his heart skips a beat and he hopes —

Hoping still hurts. That’s unfair.

Romani picks up his hair, and Fou, and steps down onto the floor, where tiles are cool under his bare foot and the kotatsu blanket is just within reach, if he stretches. His legs are still long — his legs have always been long. At least that’s not something that will have changed, between his — bodies. Somehow, this makes his breath hitch and tears fall.

“Fooooou …”

“I know. Sorry.”

He still feels as if he’s in a dream, and it’s only Fou’s warm weight against his shoulder which makes anything feel at all solid. He can almost see himself in the mirror from here, like a there-and-gone-again shade. Sometimes he’d thought he’d seen himself like that, in flashes of reflections, only to turn around and see fair skin and red hair, and known it was a trick of the eye. He hadn’t been clairvoyant.

It takes far too long before Romani can find the will to get up, cradling his hair in his arms. It doesn’t help with the weight all that much — but some. He’d forgotten how much of a pain in the neck it could be when getting up …

He used to have people who helped him take care of that.

And his centre of balance is off, _again_ , so that he stumbles a little trying to step around the kotatsu, and teeters between falling and not.

“ _Really_ ,” he complains to the open air, because there’s no one else to whom to complain — except Fou.

“Fou!”

“Yes, I know, but — _really_?! You couldn’t have picked one or the other, you had to make it somewhere in-between!?”

… He really doesn’t know who he’s talking to, and no one answers, anyway. Romani huffs and picks his way across the floor to the mirror, so he can look at himself properly. He hadn’t quite finished, the night before, and that’s why he’s pretty sure he hadn’t just hallucinated David: he had been on the track for an epic melt-down, before that.

Romani’s pretty sure he might have had a small melt-down anyway, because he remembers his pillow getting pretty soggy overnight. It was still damp when he woke up. He hadn’t had the space to wonder about his balance then, anyway.

“Fou.” Helpfully Fou hops off Romani’s shoulder and out of his hair onto the bureau next to the mirror, and Romani stares at his reflection again, tearing up helplessly. He just — can’t seem to stop that from happening.

There he is, the way he was before — all brown skin and golden eyes and white hair. So _much_ white hair. The lack of jewellery is jarring; he’s decently sure he’d had it in the Singularity, but he doesn’t now. Now he’s in scrubs, and the long bare line of his collarbone looks weirdly naked.

He touches it, smooths his fingers across it, and the hand in the mirror lifts and moves just the same, as if he’d had any doubt.

He doesn’t look like he had the second time at all, and that knowledge is like a stabbing pain in his chest that wrings from him a genuine sound, albeit one he tries to contain. Mostly that just makes it strangled, and sobbing.

“Stupid — stupid.”

He’s here, in Chaldea; he’s alive, the medical tests last night have proven that, even if they now seem — nebulously dream-like. He’d never actually died, as Romani, only used up all his life; maybe it didn’t count in the grand scheme of things, because he’s here. Alive.

Alive and looking like the king he hadn’t wanted to be.

It seems unfair, and he feels worse that it seems unfair — worse for _knowing_ he’s come out the better in this and yet, for all that, feeling short-changed just for _not looking the way he had when he had a choice_.

“Ah, damn it …” Romani leans on the bureau and bends inward, not quite sinking to the floor but definitely not able to do much beyond bury his face in one hand and try to cry quietly, in case anyone’s been posted outside his door. He really doesn’t want anyone coming in to see this.

He really doesn’t want anyone to see him being ungrateful for having another — _another!_ — chance at life, one he doesn’t deserve any more or less than anyone else. It makes him feel worse still, knowing that, and he couldn’t handle someone seeing it.

He winds up on the floor after all, curled up at the foot of the bureau in the wedge of the furniture and the wall where he’ll be out of sight of anyone coming in — at least immediately. It’s for the best if no one comes in, really.

“Foooou …”

Something thuds and tinkles on the bureau overhead, and Romani flinches as a cascade of water splashes across his head. It takes him a few seconds to remember the glass of water with the rose in it, and when he reaches up he finds the rose entangled in the crown of his hair, and hisses for pricking his fingers on it.

It’s still as red as it had been last night — red as his life’s blood drained into it. Romani finds the energy to scowl. “Your master is an asshole sometimes, you know?”

“ _Fou_.”

“He didn’t have to give me a _vicious flower_.”

“Fou!”

“Maybe that’s why I …”

The flower had taken of his blood as he had been, and Merlin had certainly used it as a tether of some sort. Against the weight of that, no wonder he doesn’t look like he did the second time. Had there even been anything physical left of him, the second time?

There shouldn’t have been anything left of the first — but that had been his body when he faced Goetia. As if his second was just — a stand-in. Something that didn’t matter. Something that would never have lasted to begin with.

“But it was mine,” Romani whispers, and his vision blurs again. “It was the only thing I got to choose.”

“Fou.” Fou lands on his head and it _hurts_ , and makes Romani laugh even as he’s crying. The laughter turns into sobs in short order, but they die out quickly. He’s already spent energy on that, and something in the rose feels warm. It’s not an ordinary rose, anyway. He turns it in his fingers, ginger and contemplative. It’s a magical construct, and feels like it — silken under touch, instead of sinewy fibre, and brimming with a passive kind of magic, the building blocks of life resting on their laurels.

The building blocks of _his_ life.

It’s hard not to be aware of the marks on that hand, almost as pale as his skin had been reborn — the scars where the rose had pierced flesh to draw his life forth.

“Wonder what Da Vinci gave Merlin to get him to make this?” Romani mutters, and it’s at least partway directed at the small body turning circles on his head, accompanied by the occasional not-quite-painful prick of tiny claws.

“ _Fou_.”

Fou settles down as a loaf, and his tail swishes around to cover Romani’s face. Romani splutters.

“Okay, okay, good grief …”

He’s a bit shaky getting on his feet, but not as much as he expects. His old body — his old _second_ body — had been a normal squishy human, and that had been a shock almost as much for the lack of magical tailoring. His tattoos aren’t just for show: they optimise his magical circuits in every possible way. Having to deal with pins and needles for the first time had not been fun.

He won’t have to deal with that now, and it’s stupid, but he already misses it.

“This is more convenient,” he argues at himself in the mirror, leaning on the bureau with the rose still between his finger-tips. “Let’s be honest, right here, right now, since you haven’t been even with yourself for almost a decade — you’ve missed magic. You’ve missed knowing what you could do with it, if clairvoyance hadn’t been involved, if it hadn’t been all tied up in … in God and … and everything else.”

Sometimes, in those early days, reaching out for something that hadn’t been there had been like missing a limb. He’d wished to be an ordinary human being, the total opposite of what he’d been in life, but he hadn’t really known what that would mean; couldn’t really comprehend how much he’d lose.

How much he’d gain.

How much he’d gained had made up for the rest, and a lot of the time, the lack of responsibility in not having magic had been _great_. Those times, in school, when he’d been mage-trained but not a mage — the relief of knowing he didn’t have to take precautions, he didn’t need to view his gifts as weapon or a curse, hadn’t had them at all … a lot of those times he’d felt like a burden had been lifted.

And then later, there’d been those times he only _wished_ he could alleviate some part of Ritsuka’s burden, and felt guilty that he couldn’t, wouldn’t have to actually go through with that … that he felt glad he couldn’t.

Romani brushes tears away from his eyes and takes a deep, shaking breath. “Well, guess what? You have it back, and your magical circuits are in fine form, and so is your Reality Marble. Congratulations.”

No one should be able to go visit Ars Paulina, at least, but Ars Paulina had only been the part the 72 had inhabited. The bulk of it, the foundation on which they’d built, is right here.

He’s not sure how he feels about that. A little relieved, like he’s finally found his comfortable shoes; a little uptight, as if now he’s got to be on alert for _everything_.

Carefully, fingers trembling a little, Romani puts the glass upright and puts the flower in, and rests his fingers on the edge. “O life-giving water, create a trickle for this flower; create in this small receptacle a new life, for it to persevere ongoing …”

Water smooths down the side of the glass like a curtain, until the cup is full again, and the flower looks redder than ever, with droplets on its petals.

“Fou.”

“It wasn’t that difficult.”

But something in his chest feels a little lighter, and this time the tears aren’t that hard aching pain but for some kind of release he hadn’t expected, hadn’t intended. He can give life to a rose.

… He could have just walked it over to the sink, honestly, that was stupid and unnecessary, and he shouldn’t get in the habit of it. Magic doesn’t solve most things; it just makes them a little easier, a little more efficient.

And Romani is absolutely avoiding having to look at himself again. He wipes his face with his forearm, since he doesn’t have a sleeve, or even a robe, and looks at the mirror.

His face is still dripping, and Fou is still loafed on his head, looking back at Romani with luminous eyes in a faintly prismatic ruff of fur.

Romani’s skin is still brown.

His eyes are still gold.

His hair is still white.

“That’s not going to change again, is it?” he asks Fou in the mirror, and Fou’s tail swishes. “Yeah. I know.”

He’s just going to — have to get used to that. And anyway it’s not like _everything_ went back to how it was, the first time. His shoulders are broader than they had been, as Romani, but his frame is narrower than it had been as Solomon: he’s pretty sure his height’s just about the same, but the general distribution of his muscle-mass has shifted along with his frame.

Somewhere in-between. Not much of a range — but enough of one, to not be either of them.

The difference between two like-seeming brothers, maybe.

… Oh, that thought makes his chest hurt. Romani sniffs and wipes his face again, and reaches up to pluck Fou off his head. Fou only squirms a little, and doesn’t resist being set down on the bureau, and sits to watch Romani without needing his reflection. Romani takes a deep breath and pulls his hair back, the way he had last night, when he’d been hoping —

The image is jarring. With enough of his hair squeezed, he really can’t tell it’s so long, behind his back; and with it up like this …

It’s not exactly the same. The wings around his ears don’t fall the same way; Romani’s hair had been smooth and thin fluff. Solomon’s hair is fluffier still, mostly because of texture and body. It’s still got that, now, and it makes it drape more thickly.

But drawn back like this, with bangs and a cowlick — Romani can see himself as he’d become. Just enough. And when he turns his head, he’s pretty sure — maybe — he’s _pretty sure_ he can see reddish highlights that he definitely hadn’t had, once upon a time. He seems to remember Ritsuka commenting on it, too, so it’s not just wishful thinking or some strains of clairvoyance forever reminding him of what he’d lost.

“What I _gained_ ,” he reminds himself. “I got a second life, remember. Even if it was pretty short.”

And not really all that free, with that thunderclap of clairvoyance in the moment of transition. He still has nightmares about that.

Romani exhales slowly and lets his hair fall, and stares a little more at the simple shift between _maybe doctor_ and _definitely king_ , and nods. “Yep. I’m definitely gonna need a haircut.”


	2. And a loyal friend is hard to find

It takes some time more before Romani leaves his room. After abandoning the mirror he needs to move around it again. He’d done it last night, but he honestly doesn’t remember most of what he saw or felt. Everything after the command-room is a blur of tangled emotions and fatigue.

He remembers feeling guilty about wanting, very suddenly, to escape from the joy and relief of the people around him, and that’s about it — other than the realisation that he’d lost who he was, the second time.

Maybe not lost. Maybe not.

He moves around the room in a half-daze, the same path he’d walked before: touching things, moving the chair back to the desk, sitting in it for a while … his laptop is in the drawer. He’s not sure he remembers the password, but that’s okay. Babbage is bound to know how to help.

The bathroom feels alien to this body — or maybe this body feels alien in it. It’s spick and span, a modern bathroom; shower, no room for a bath, but everything the modern man needs. Romani picks up his aftershave, smells it — it seems to clash with the face in the mirror. Maybe he should try something else … it doesn’t smell quite like it had before, either.

His brain’s changed a little too. Maybe not his mind, not who he was bereft of the weight of God’s Hand — but his brain, yes, definitely.

… It’s almost a relief to remember that, that he’s not who he’d been in either sense. What would he have looked like under a catscan, while he’d been king? How many colours would his brain have lit up under that machine?

Romani’s a little glad he doesn’t need to find out.

The wardrobe is last, at least partly because it’s close to the door, and that seems like a natural cycle around when he’s working his way up to … not being in this room. Not being alone. Fou is mostly patient, watching him investigate this space that had been his and continuously shy away from the wardrobe and the door.

Mostly. Eventually Fou yawns and flops on the kotatsu blanket with a sharp _“Fou_ ,” and starts kneading with a vengeance.

“You’ll pull up the threads,” Romani objects, bending down to pick him up and getting a nip on the finger for his trouble. He picks Fou up anyway, plonking him on the bed. “Here, knead that. That blanket’s already ruined.”

He never had been able to keep Fou out of his room, after the first time they met …

Spitefully Fou hops down and sits on the kotatsu blanket, staring up at Romani unblinking and with a swishing tail, and tiny, tiny motions of his paws. _Threatening_ motions of his paws. Romani throws up his hands.

“ _Okay_! Okay, I’m looking at my wardrobe so we can _leave the room_ , are you _happy now_?”

“Fou!”

Grumbling, Romani goes to the wardrobe and throws it open, but he’s at least vaguely aware of the fact he’s smiling. This had been something he’d missed, too … oh, he’d always spoken to animals, he couldn’t help it, and the first time they met Fou’s judgement had been cutting. Now there’s a resonance of understanding now there hadn’t been before. At least, not one that hadn’t been carried mostly by Fou, and now seems to be carried by Romani …

Hm. Someone had mentioned Fou has seemed different lately. Romani will need to think about that a little more.

Right now, even without the rings, Romani can _almost_ hear words in everything Fou says, in his beastie way — and it’s a comfort, like a return to a much-loved childhood blanket. He always had enjoyed that particular power.

Romani spends longer rifling through his wardrobe than is probably strictly necessary, but as long as he’s in it, Fou doesn’t seem inclined to start tearing up his kotatsu blanket; and Romani feels like he needs the space.

For one thing, he doesn’t remember most of these clothes.

For another, had he _really_ needed this many uniforms?

Withholding a sigh, Romani pulls out some pants and a T-shirt, and one of his medical coats. Holds it up against him; looks in the mirror.

Makes a face. “Ergh. This is going to be a pain.”

Nothing in his wardrobe really suits the face he’s wearing anymore. Maybe it’ll be better once his hair is cut … maybe. For now he just needs something to _wear_.

It’s not until he’s pulling on a T-shirt and trying to get all of his hair through the collar that he realises the subtle changes in build have made his clothes less fitting than they had been. He lets out an entirely undignified and wordless groan at that realisation, tugging on the sleeves of the T-shirt and the hem of the pants, and yanking the last of his hair loose. Yes, he’s got a little more heft to him — not so much that he can’t wear his old clothes, but just enough that the pants are a little too tight around the waist and thighs, and the shirt definitely too tight around his chest and arms.

… He can’t go out looking like this; he shudders to think. It’s practically indecent.

“Fou?”

“There’s a difference between wearing something made with no sleeves and wearing something that’s _abjectly too tight_.”

“Fou!”

Romani turns back toward his wardrobe to pull out one of his coats and the moment of orientation feels like static: a touch of a shock, a catch in his breath, the waft of a colour in front of his vision that has sounds and smells in it, something purple and steady. Like a potato. Only … not.

Someone knocks on the door, and Mash’s voice sounds through it, hushed and uncertain. “Um, Doctor? S- sorry to disturb you —! Um, if you’re still asleep it’s fine. I just heard your voice and thought I might check, that’s all. Um. Let me know?”

Romani stands there, fixed into place and unblinking, his entire body a clench of — where is it? Where’s the rest of the vision?

… Was that it? Just that — faint little chord of warning, that someone’s outside the door? It wasn’t even _important_!

Well. _Mash_ is important, he supposes. Maybe it counts.

His mouth works, and he finds some manner of sound. “I —” Not a very good sound, and it catches in his throat. Romani coughs, clears it, tries to make the horrible tension in his body unwind. “I, um, was just trying to figure out something to wear …”

“Are there no clothes in the wardrobe?” Mash asks, a little less hesitant than before. She sounds — so grown up. Like she knows what she’s doing. “I’m sorry, Doctor, I was sure we’d left them in there — I can go check to see if someone put them in the quartermaster’s instead, if you like?”

Oh, damn it. Why is _this_ making him tear up, of all things? Romani blinks against the prickle in his eyes and forces himself to stop clutching one of his medical coats to his chest.

“N- no — it’s not that.” He shakes it out, and can’t tell if his hands are shaking on their own or not. “It’s just that … they don’t totally fit anymore …”

He sounds absolutely pathetic, and hates that. Of all the people he doesn’t want to sound pathetic to, Mash is on the top of the list. Especially in the space of startled silence.

“Oh!” she says, finally, like her surprise needed the physical outlet before it could end. “We, um — we didn’t think of that. Is it — I mean, I can go down and see what we have …?”

“No, no …” Romani thinks quickly on this automatic response, and decides it’s valid. “I can still — wear it, mostly, it’s just a bit tight. We can — we can visit the quartermaster’s today, maybe. I don’t know what my measurements are, now.”

He pulls on the coat, shaking his hair over his shoulder to make sure it doesn’t get caught. The coat’s still too tight around his biceps, and definitely too tight around the chest to zip up; but it at least looks more decent than the tight tee, as long as he leaves it open. Even if it does curtail his arm movements a little.

He tugs fitfully on the collar and gives up in favour of trying to get the stragglers from his hair out from under it. He’s still struggling with that when he goes to the door to swipe it open, and then there’s Mash standing in the entrance and blinking up at him past the drape of her bangs.

“Fou!” Fou bounces past their feet and into the hall, shaking himself.

Romani smiles, crookedly self-conscious. “It looks really bad, doesn’t it?”

She looks him down. She looks him up. Tries not to smile, and doesn’t do a very good job. “It kind of does. Oh, it’s okay — maybe Uncle Vlad can make something else for you?”

“That’s a good idea.” Maybe. Possibly. Romani isn’t sure how he feels about having a vampire, or vampire adjacent, with sharp scissors and needles near him; but Vlad’s the best tailor they have in Chaldea, with so many staff — uh, missing.

Romani steps out into the hall, turns to swipe the door closed, and Mash yelps.

“Ah — your hair —”

She scoops it up before the door can close on it, and Romani gathers it up in a bundle under his arm, and with a sigh. “This is going to get to be a pain, very fast.”

“It’s so pretty, though.” He’s pretty sure Mash is stroking the part she’s carrying, and doesn’t dare to look over in case she thinks she shouldn’t, or is embarrassed being caught doing so. Instead he looks down at the hair in his arms, and shakes his head.

“I can’t go around like this. It might be decent for kings, but not for — not for doctors.”

His voice wobbles, just a little, and he bites his lip to keep it in. He hadn’t even thought about whether they still _needed_ him as a doctor … oh, they wouldn’t turn him down, if they’re not getting funding from the Mage’s Association, but that’s sure to change, and …

Oh. _Crap_. The Mage’s Association. _The Animuspheres_. How’s he going to explain all this?!

Mash’s hand slides under his pile of hair to grip his, and Romani breaks away from his impending panic attack to look at her smiling face.

“You’re here, Doctor,” she says, so warmly that it makes his chest inflate and eyes prickle. She tugs gently on his hand and he’s powerless to resist, even if he’d wanted to do so to begin with. “Come on. Are you hungry? I bet you’re hungry. I don’t know how much food you had in Jerusalem, but it was a war situation so I’ll bet it was rationed.”

“I —”

Actually, he hadn’t eaten that much, thanks to his magical circuits; but he closes his mouth on that admission and lets Mash lead him toward the cafeteria, his hair bundled under his arm. His coat chafes, his pants are too tight. His shoes don’t fit that well anymore either, he finds before they’ve reached the end of the hall.

But Mash’s hand is warm in his, and that alleviates a lot of the panic fluttering under the lock of his throat. There’s going to be — _people_ — in the cafeteria — probably.

“Um, I didn’t … check the time …” He starts pulling back a little, without realising that he is; but Mash bears into his reticence with the whole of her weight, and keeps tugging him inexorably onward. Even if he’d wanted to set his feet, Romani’s not sure he would have stayed.

“It’s not noon yet,” Mash chirrups helpfully without looking around. “But it’s close enough that Emiya’s bringing out some food.”

The flutter gets worse. If Emiya’s bringing out food, there’s _definitely_ going to be people in the cafeteria —!

“Uh … um …”

“I thought we could take over part of the kitchen,” Mash goes on, “since there’s plenty of space down the end.” It’s true: the kitchen is large, meant to be feeding a population significantly larger than Chaldea currently boasts. Even with Servants filling out the numbers, many of them don’t bother to eat — or don’t eat regularly — and even Emiya is hard pressed to use the entirety of the kitchen. He’s just one cook; it was built with dozens.

Tamamo-Cat almost makes up for that. Almost.

“Oh …”

Romani’s chest inflates some more and he feels vaguely guilty that he’d thought Mash might not have thought of that. The kitchen has more than one entrance, so maybe they don’t even need to pass through the cafeteria.

And they don’t: Mash takes Romani around the other side, where there’s a staff entrance leading into the kitchen far away from the doors leading to the eatery. She stops there and turns to him, brushing hair off her face which immediately flutters back to where it was, and beams up at him. It’s the kind of smile that makes his heart stop a beat.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she says, a little hushed and suddenly a little worried. “We don’t want to force you or anything, but Da Vinci thought it would be a good idea to get you to some ordinary places as soon as possible, you know?”

Romani nods wordlessly, mostly because his throat seems to have locked up again and he can’t find any words which will break through. Mash gives him another few beats to answer, but he doesn’t; and in the end she just squeezes his hand and smiles bravely, and opens the door.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting. He’s pretty sure there will be a clatter of pots, pans, things sizzling, heat from the ovens — and there are all those things. There’s also Emiya and Tamamo-Cat arguing, which is pretty normal.

And there’s a card table set up at the nearest end of the kitchen, where the counters are clean and shiny and the cooks don’t need the space. Ritsuka’s sitting at it, kicking her feet and watching the Emiya-Tamamo show; Da Vinci is a ways behind it, with something mechanical dismantled on the otherwise pristine counter.

But when the door opens Ritsuka’s head snaps around and Da Vinci looks up, and both of their faces puts a lump in Romani’s throat before they’ve even done anything. Ritsuka beams; Da Vinci’s smile is the smaller, mischievous sort.

“Look who I have,” Mash announces, grinning broadly as she tugs Romani into the kitchen, with Fou bounding forward at their feet.

“Good morning!” Ritsuka says with just a little too much cheer. She’s halfway to her feet, doesn’t seem to realise it; but then she does, and comes the rest of the way, skirting the table to glom around Romani’s waist. Romani lets out a breathless wheeze of a sound, and doesn’t know if it’s a laugh or something else.

“Hmm.” Da Vinci’s gaze is more penetratingly thoughtful. “Those clothes are far too tight, Romani.”

Romani’s throat unlocks, finally, on spluttering indignation. “I know _that_!” He motions with the arm holding his hair, because it’s the only arm he has at his disposal, and Da Vinci laughs before he can say anything else. Romani scowls. “Mean.”

“Come sit down,” she says, patting the card table with her gauntlet hand, and takes her own seat primly, with a flick of hair so it isn’t caught by the back of her seat.

“Yeah, c’mon!” Ritsuka pulls back only to tug on Romani’s arm. Her grin has not dimmed one bit. “Emiya made _shortcake_!”

Romani brightens. “There’s shortcake?”

“Senpai!” Mash scolds. “You weren’t supposed to tell him that until after he’s had a proper breakfast!”

Ritsuka sticks out her tongue. “No way. Bribe the doctor with shortcake, that’s the way to go. Hey, Emiya —!”

She spins and almost crashes into Emiya, who in the interim has gone silent. Behind him, Tamamo-Cat hovers, looking wide-eyed and mouthing something Romani can’t begin to guess. Her paws are in claws, so maybe she’s just pretending to maul Emiya from behind, he doesn’t know.

Emiya looks Romani up. Looks Romani down. Self-consciously Romani waves, a small finger-crinkle with the hand still carrying the bundle of hair. “Um. Hi? Thank you for shortcake?”

There is definitely a frown there. “You didn’t mention the hair.”

Ritsuka looks back at Romani. Looks him up. Looks him down. That is going to get very annoying, very fast. “Why, what about it? Isn’t it gorgeous?”

“It’s long,” says Emiya. “It’s thick. Do you know what kind of a hassle long hair is, in the kitchen? It’s hard enough keeping this place clean without hair and —” He glances back just a smidge to eyeball Tamamo-Cat. She sticks her tongue out at him. “— _fur_ getting in everything.”

“Oh, but we’ll only be down this side of the kitchen,” says Mash earnestly, but her grip on Romani’s hand tightens. His chest seems to have tightened too, but he’s not sure if it’s in tears or hysterical laughter. Of all the things to be tossed out of the kitchen for — it’s not his face or his clothes or the fact that he’s responsible for _all of this_ — no. It’s for the length of his hair.

“Mash is right,” says Da Vinci. “Surely it won’t get in the way if we stay down this end.”

Emiya gives Romani a thorough, suspicious eyeballing again. “I find _a single hair_ that’s white and longer than a foot —”

“It might be Vlad’s,” says Ritsuka promptly. “Or Amakusa’s. There’s a lot of people around here with long white hair, Emiya, and you could be one of them.”

“If I had hair that long I’d wear a hair-net in the kitchen.” Emiya sniffs, gives Romani one more dagger of a look, and turns away, forcing Tamamo-Cat to skip back to avoid a collision. She winks at them, curls her paws again.

“Rawr.”

And skips after Emiya. “Hey, so, I’m right about the soy sauce —”

“ _We’re not putting soy sauce on pancakes_.”

Ritsuka breaks into fits of giggles, and Romani feels a smile crawl reluctantly over his face, and lets Mash lead him to the table and sit him down.

“We could have braided it,” Mash says in undertone, and the look she gives him, and his hair, is a lot less evil than Emiya’s had been, and a lot more eager. “Actually, we probably should … it’s going to get tiring for you to have to carry it around like that all the time, huh, Doctor?”

“I don’t remember it touching the floor,” says Da Vinci thoughtfully, and Romani looks up from putting the bundle of hair in his lap to find all three of them looking at him with the same contemplative looks.

“Um …”

“It didn’t,” says Ritsuka slowly, “not quite. Not in the Temple, anyway, or in Jerusalem. It’s still twice as long as Goetia’s was, though. And I guess it was hard to tell? I mean, you were floating.”

“Floating?” Mash echoes, startled.

“Floating?” Da Vinci murmurs, giving Romani an inscrutable look. Romani feels his face warming, despite everything. Ritsuka nods, framing a shape in the air with her hands, though what kind of shape is necessary here, Romani has no idea.

“Uh huh. I mean, the Temple of Time kind of had that anti-gravity thing going on, but I never had trouble keeping my feet on the ground. But I don’t think the doctor’s even touched it, after — well. You know.”

“It was an excess of power,” Romani mumbles, and yes, his face is very definitely hot. He’s not sure if he’s hoping they can see it so they know this isn’t a good topic, or he’s thankful they might not be able to because his skin is no longer fair. “It’d been a while. And anyway, that was — well. It was mine, you know?”

“I suppose it’s hard for you to stand on your own magical circuits,” Da Vinci says dryly, and Romani nods, thankful for Da Vinci’s ability to hear what he hasn’t strictly said. “Still, I imagine it would make that —” She points at his hair with her fork. “— _much_ easier to handle, if you could still float everywhere.”

Romani grimaces. “Ah, it’s a bit hard on the neck … I used to have a dozen people helping me with it, you know.”

“Oh, I bet we could find people to volunteer here,” says Mash, brightening.

“Ah, well …” Romani coughs. “Actually, I was mostly thinking I’d cut it off …”

“ _What_?!” Ritsuka shrieks.

“Oh, but —” Mash begins. They interrupt each other. Mash looks at Ritsuka, Ritsuka doesn’t look back; she’s too busy looking at Romani, all disappointment attempting to be professional, or at least grown-up.

“I mean —” Ritsuka takes a deep breath and deflates, almost down to a slumped puddle on the table as she thunks her forehead on the surface. “Well, it’s your hair. Darn it. I was really looking forward to playing with that.”

Mash nods with fervent silence, though she hides the disappointment better. Ritsuka tends to feel things with every fiber in her body.

Romani doesn’t say anything immediately, because he doesn’t know what to say. Part of him feels like shriveling up and sinking into the floor with guilt; part of him feels like giving in, letting them have their way with his hair. But another part of him, and this is the conflict that makes the guilt, really doesn’t want to have to deal with his reflection looking like this.

It’s not even the fact of having to deal with the hair. It’s just — the way he looks.

“It’s just so pretty,” Ritsuka adds after a second, just short of whining and very definitely pointedly beseeching as she turns her head, still resting on the table, to look at Romani sidelong. “And long and … _fun_. But, I guess, if it’s that much effort to deal with …”

Romani looks at Da Vinci, because she’s the only one not making those faces at him. Hers is almost worse: a faint smile, and understanding that cuts right to the core of him, and makes his sight go blurry.

“Ah, Ritsuka,” she says, soft and not quite somber; too amused for that, too knowing. “I don’t think Romani cutting it off has much to do with how difficult it is to handle. I think it has more to do with how it makes him look.”

Ritsuka sits up with almost a jolt, and rubs her forehead with her fist until the mark on it goes away. She looks at Romani. Mash looks at Romani.

Romani looks down at his lap, and the bundle of long white hair, and blinks until he’s decently sure no tears have fallen. At least, he’s sure enough until Mash reaches over to grip his hand.

“Please don’t cry, Doctor,” she whispers. “Sorry — I’m sorry. I — we didn’t think. It’s okay, we can play with someone else’s hair. Right, Senpai?”

“Yeah,” says Ritsuka, in that brittle-brave tone where she’s saying something she wants to forcible make true, even if it isn’t. Her face is still doing disappointed things, what Romani can see of it past his hair and his brow. “Yeah, we can hunt down Amakusa again, or Kojirou — Kojirou’s got nice hair, and he likes ribbons —”

This really isn’t making things any better. Romani has to wipe his face and exhale shakily. He uses the hand Mash isn’t holding.

“I wouldn’t cut it all the way?” he tries. “Just like — to where it was before?”

Out of the corner of his vision he sees Ritsuka brighten. “Oh, we can still do things with it, if it’s that length!”

It won’t be this — absurd train, Romani knows; and he knows that’s at least part of the appeal, the veritable wealth of a resource. But he — he just can’t. He just can’t.

Mash squeezes his hand, and Romani’s throat locks up again. He blinks some more, but this only encourages the tears to fall instead. “I have an idea,” says Mash. “It’s so long and pretty — what if we cut it and give it to kids who’ve lost their hair because they’re sick, and need wigs?”

“Mash!” Ritsuka’s beam is practically audible. “That’s a _great_ idea! That way, no matter what, someone gets to have fun with it!”

“And it’s easily done, too,” says Da Vinci cheerfully. “You don’t need to go to a special hairdresser, only make sure it’s in proper lengths and bunches. There’s probably a dozen sites we can donate it to. Good idea, Mash.”

It — really is. It really, really is, and while it makes Romani’s throat unlock, it’s only in the way that causes more tears to fall. But he lifts his chin and smiles wobbily at Mash, and squeezes her hand.

“Yeah, I’d — I’d like that. Um. Please.”

At least then someone will get to make use of it … it’s not like he’s Samson.

Mash smiles back, her eyes suspiciously shiny, and if she’s going to say anything — or Romani’s going to say anything — Fou interrupts it by jumping onto Romani’s lap.

“ _Fou_!” Romani’s voice is strangled as he snatches his hand away before it can get kneaded along with his hair. Ritsuka and Mash laugh, the edged kind which suggests it’ll go on longer than strictly necessary; but it breaks some of the brittle tension, and Romani finds himself laughing too, along with the tears.

“As long as we get to play with it a _little_ ,” Ritsuka weedles, still grinning. “Just some braids and some ribbons —”

“I still think he’d look good with a bun,” Mash objects. “It’d be like a topknot — like Amakusa.”

Ritsuka scoffs. “As if he’d want to look like _Amakusa_. Anyway, it’d still leave most of it loose, that’ll get in the way —”

Romani listens to them chatting about what they’d do to their hair, and finds himself smiling. He only notices it when Da Vinci leans over to poke his cheek, her own smile mischievous.

“There, that’s better. Anyway, girls, you’ll get a chance to play. His hair will need a wash before I can cut it.”

“You?” Romani blurts, and then he frowns. “Excuse me. Are you saying my hair is _dirty_?”

Da Vinci gives him a very archly amused look. “Romani, when did you last wash it? At all, during the Singularity?”

…. Um. Romani’s face heats and he resists the urge to hunch his shoulders. “Water was rationed?” he tries, and Mash giggles. He grins crookedly sheepish. “Okay, I didn’t actually wash my hair in the Singularity. It’s really long and really thick, in case you didn’t notice.”

Now Ritsuka’s giggling. Da Vinci sighs a long-suffering sigh, but one which doesn’t at all undermine the smile she’s wearing, and she leans forward again to rub some of Romani’s hair between her fingers.

“Mhm. And now it’s in need of one. Isn’t that a happy coincidence? Now Mash and Ritsuka get to have fun with your hair, and it’ll make it easier for me to cut.”

“I’ll bet we can use the spa-bath in the recreation area,” says Mash with as much glee as Mash ever gets. “We’ve opened some of those areas, Doctor. I bet it’d fit in there.”

“It’d work better if Romani had a chair to sit in while his hair was in the tub,” says Da Vinci. “Give me a day or two; I’m sure I can come up with something.”

“Hey,” Romani objects, “what happened to the travesty that is my unwashed hair?”

“It’s long and it’s thick,” Da Vinci reminds him, “it can last a few extra days. Honestly.”

“Whatever you make is only going to get used once, I hope you know. It could be called a waste of resources.”

“Nonsense!” she answers cheerfully. “I’m sure I can disassemble it and make it into something else. Actually, I think there’s still some parts left over from Ishtar’s drag-racing contest that might do well …”

Romani really means to be more offended about his hair, but Fou flops down in his lap in that moment, and also that little remark kind of makes it difficult to focus on the _hair_.

“Ishtar’s _what_ now?!”

Ritsuka starts laughing. Mash starts giggling that soft, semi-uncomfortable giggle. Da Vinci favours him with a long, arch look.

“Romani,” she says, “did you think we weren’t having adventures while you were having your own? Please.”

Romani scowls, torn between feeling left out and just wanting to know more. Wanting to know more wins out. “Okay, fine. But you have to tell me everything.”

“After cake!” Ritsuka beckons over Mash’s shoulder, grinning hugely, and Mash leans away to make space; and Emiya, bearing a large platter of a shortcake, leans down to set it on the table. There’s cream. There’s strawberries. _Real_ strawberries, because the world is no longer half-existing, because it is now possible to get fresh supplies in.

Real cream. Real strawberries.

It’s super duper lame that Romani’s visions starts blurring again. He rubs his eyes and asks, trying desperately to distract them from his ongoing waterworks: “There’s a candle?”

“It’s your first day back,” says Mash, very earnestly, and squeezes his hand again. “Welcome back, Doctor.”

“Welcome back,” says Emiya gruffly, and turns around and escapes from their side of the kitchen before he has to admit to having emotions that aren’t related to children. That really isn’t helping with the waterworks.

“I’ve gotten so lame,” he mutters, rubbing his eyes some more, and Ritsuka laughs.

“Doctor, you’ve _always_ been lame. It’s one of the most wonderful things about you. Now, it’s okay. I’m gonna cut the cake, and you’re gonna get the biggest slice, and then Da Vinci is going to tell you all about Ishtar’s drag race Singularity.”

That, honestly, sounds like the best breakfast possible, and the way Romani’s chest feels warm and full really isn’t helping with the tears. But it feels good. It feels really, really good.


	3. You're caught in a one-way street

Breakfast takes a while, mostly because Da Vinci keeps embellishing. At least, Romani assumes she keeps embellishing, but when Ritsuka and Mash interrupt it’s usually to add more, not to correct. Well, not to correct her _much_ , anyway.

Ishtar’s stupidity leads to a few other Singularities. Some of them — most of them, actually — are very small things; pockets of might-bes, things that would be more dangerous to ignore while they have the resources to attend them. Most of them seem to involve some shift in Servant personality, and Da Vinci seems set to go on a long lecture about lensing effects on perception and history which Romani is entirely prepared to listen to — and probably, possibly, enjoy, without telling her — but it turns out Mash and Ritsuka have already had to listen to this.

The moment Da Vinci takes a breath, Ritsuka seizes the opportunity to say: “Sherlock told me something like that too.”

And that leads to telling him about Sherlock Holmes. Romani feels a brief stab of hurt when Ritsuka admits he’d been there, in Camelot, that he’d told Ritsuka not to trust him; but the stab is almost at once covered over by the knowledge that none of them, truly, had actually doubted him.

He would have told them to doubt him, if he’d had the courage to face up to who he’d been. It’s a justified response, and he tells them that. Ritsuka shakes her head with her jaw set in its most stubborn frame, the one that sets her lip out in something that ought to be a pout and isn’t. Mostly.

“No way,” she said. “I mean, I talked to Da Vinci about it — but even if Da Vinci hadn’t said that she trusts you, I wouldn’t have stopped either. You’ve helped save everyone, Doctor. You took care of us. So you had secrets — so what? Just having a secret doesn’t mean the secret is betrayal.”

At which point Romani’s throat closed up again and he had to wipe his eyes some more while the women waited patiently, and Ritsuka goes on to tell him about Shinjuku. After that the first thing he’s at all able to say is: “ _Excuse me?!_ We have _James Moriarty_ in Chaldea _right now_?!”

To be fair, he manages it with a fair amount of shocked consternation, which does a lot to unblock his throat. They all laugh at him, which is fine, because most of them nod ruefully in some measure too.

“He’s promised to be on his best behaviour,” says Ritsuka, “but that doesn’t say much. He can’t seem to stop himself putting his fingers in all the pies. Do you know, _he’s_ the reason the last Halloween was so …”

She motions inarticulately while Mash nods with fervent agreement which in no way explains what Halloween was ‘so’.

Romani feels a distinct sinking feeling, and also possibly some stray traces of guilt. It’s hard to have a friend you really don’t want to visit for their favourite holiday. (It’s harder to have to deal with the Singularity involved.) “Don’t tell me …”

“Yep,” they all chorus. “Elisabeth’s castle got taken over again.”

So then they have to tell him _that_ story, and Romani winds up with his head in his hands, cry-laughing for the ridiculousness of it all.

“Right?!” Ritsuka motions wildly. “I love Elisabeth, I really do, she’s so indefatigably _happy_ — but _good grief_ , woman, get a hold of yourself.”

“Ah, to be a young woman once again,” says Da Vinci musingly, and then adds, “Or for the first time, in my case. Sometimes I do wonder what that experience would be like.”

Mash and Ritsuka exchange private glances Romani is not even going to begin to try to interpret, but then they both erupt into giggles, so whatever it was, it was probably hilarious.

By this point the shortcake is most definitely history and Emiya has quietly brought out some actual proper breakfast-lunch-brunch dishes, and they’ve been steadily working their way through them; but Da Vinci, ignoring the girls to look at her watch, declares it’s time to go back to work.

“Why don’t the two of you show Romani around Chaldea,” she suggests with wicked cheer, scooping up the bits and bobs that were strewn across the counter. “I’m sure there’s things here he can catch up on.”

“I _was_ working here for years before things happened, you know,” Romani protests as she leaves, and Mash giggles, taking his hand and getting up.

“Come on, Doctor. We’ve been able to repair parts of the facility — and now there’s a lot more Servants around!”

“Yeah, like Moriarty,” Romani grumbles, scooping up his hair, and Fou, to cradle in one arm while he concedes to Mash’s tug. Fou wriggles around, either to re-situate or bury himself more deeply in the cocoon. “Da Vinci’s right, you know. There’s something wibbly going on if fictional characters are starting to manifest as Heroic Spirits.”

“Sherlock never did give me a straight answer on that one,” Ritsuka says thoughtfully. “Something something — you can’t prove they _didn’t_ exist, and so on. He used Gilgamesh as a reasoning for that. His stories are so old we really don’t have any proof he existed.” She looks sidelong at him, a quick darting thing as she comes to his side — the side Mash isn’t on, and the one without the free hand. “David said something like that too.”

“Did he?”

“Mhm. He said no one has been able to find archaeological evidence of your reign.” She frowns. “He was being petty about it, too.”

Romani can’t help but laugh a little, and if it comes out a bit strangled, he’s not going to say anything if they aren’t. “Yes, well, the same could be said for him too, can’t it? Archeologically speaking, people know that Jerusalem was once a fort occupied by Jews — but, _archeologically_ speaking, there’s no evidence it was _David_.”

“So basically,” Ritsuka says, “time and history are a big bunch of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey things and we should expect basically anything to appear.”

“Pretty much,” Romani admits. “I’d be surprised if anything from that far back appeared under its own merit — humanity has more people in it now than at any other point in history. It makes sense that so many people have some additional collective power.” He shudders a little. “I still want to know who thought up Elizabeth Báthory as an idol, though …”

He’s pretty sure it wasn’t him, and anyway, it’s not like he was a mage who had that much power at the time.

“Anyway, we have a lot of new faces here,” says Ritsuka, skipping neatly over having to consider any of that. Metaphysics makes Romani’s brain hurt, and that’s even accounting for clairvoyance, or lack of it. “I’m not sure how many of them know … about you, I mean. A lot of them already seemed to know about the Incineration of Humanity — but, well, we can just show up and see what they say and how they look, I guess.”

… Oh. Oh, Romani is suddenly having the sinking feeling of being something shown off to everyone. Especially to a lot of people who, while they haven’t met him, might think …

_Who is that? He sounds like a coward._

Romani cringes and clears his throat. “Um …”

Mash squeezes his hand, looks around him at Ritsuka. “Maybe we should take it slow, Senpai? The infirmary and the command-room, and some of the new areas?”

Ritsuka peeks up at his face and immediately nods. “Yeah, okay.”

“Oh, and Uncle Vlad,” Mash adds after a minute. “The doctor’s clothes don’t fit anymore.”

“Man, that sucks,” Ritsuka says, but she seems to be trying to conceal a smile, and badly. “It’s like you’re going through puberty again or something. I swear I had a favourite shirt that fit two months ago, and now it doesn’t —”

“That’s because you eat too much candy, Senpai, not because of growth spurts,” says Mash, sounding very long-suffering.

“I do not! I eat just the right amount of candy!”

Romani laughs softly and behind the cover of a smile which takes very little effort to appear. That was the point, he suspects: to stop him from having to worry.

They keep arguing around him as they walk, with Mash’s hand in his and Ritsuka’s looped around the underside of his elbow, and Fou a breathing bundle of fur and hair against Romani’s chest and in his arm.

He really doesn’t pay much attention to where they’re going. He’s too busy listening to them argue, the sound of their tones; the easiness with which they disagree, and the warmth of it. These girls are really … very close, and very grown-up, aren’t they?

… He doesn’t remember his daughters when they had grown up. He doesn’t remember much about his children’s childhoods at all. Not in the ways that matter.

When he lowers his chin a little it’s only to make his hair fall across the top of his face, to hide the wetness of his eyes now he has no hands to wipe the tears away; but the smile is deep and lingering.

“So we haven’t had the finances to repair everything yet, Doctor,” says Mash at some point as they get closer: and the halls look much the same as they always do, but when Romani gazes around he has a feeling of sideways deja vu: of being somewhere he never thought he would be again, and also _hasn’t_ been since before everything went south.

“How long did it take to thaw the pool?” he asks without thinking. Ritsuka laughs and Mash winces, hissing between her teeth.

“Ah, well, not that long …”

“A lot of the Servants were _really happy_ to help,” Ritsuka adds with a huge grin. “I didn’t know you could burn water, though …”

“Senpai!”

“Well, I didn’t. It was ice; ice shouldn’t burn.”

“There was _fire_ involved, Senpai.”

“Nothing else in the room got burned. … Mostly.”

Romani laughs again, quiet and breathless, and storing these little stories away in his heart as his girls lead him into the recreational area. The doors lead into a hall: the hall splits out into rooms. He remembers the gym being up here, all wide double-doors, most of the time open. They’ve been closed for — well, for well over a year … so many of Chaldea’s wings had been closed.

Something in his gut flutters as they approach those doors, now open; and for a few moments Romani feels as if he’s walking in a daze, stuck between _now_ and _then_ , except without the rainbow highlights of clairvoyance telling him which is which. The only grounding thing is Ritsuka’s voice.

“A lot of the tech-minded Servants banded together to repair or replace the gym equipment,” she says as they come to the doors and look in. It’s in use; of course it’s in use. Fewer machines than Romani remembers, more open space for sparring and fights and training: but there’s a corner, specifically, where machines are densest and it’s the same corner where …

Ritsuka points across the room and her voice fades in and out. Romani follows where she points, staring with a dazed kind of comprehension. The last time he’d been in this room — the last time —

_“Come now, Romani, you can do better than that.”_

_“Shut up! We didn’t all run track in med-school!”_

_“That’s because you spent too long eating shortcakes,_ Doctor _.”_

“Doctor?”

Mash’s voice is alarmed and Romani realises he’s shaking hard enough that he’s almost dropped Fou, and Fou’s claws are pinpricks through fabric where he clings to Romani’s clothes to avoid being dumped on the floor. Romani takes a breath and it’s a ragged tear-filled thing; and he — he can’t.

He turns away abruptly, takes a few steps before his knees no longer want to hold him, and sinks against the far wall, pressing his hand to his mouth. He can feel the girls hovering, Mash crouching by him and Ritsuka upright, half-protective; but even knowing that doesn’t mean he can uncurl to talk to them, to — to explain.

He can’t. There’s a massive weight in his chest and it crushes everything else, even the tears, so he can’t even excise it by weeping. It just — it just _hurts_. It just sits there and hurts, and robs all the strength from his limbs. The most he can manage is turn so he can sit properly on the floor, letting Fou down so he can wrap his arms around his legs and bury his face in his knees.

“Doctor Roman?” Ritsuka asks softly. He shakes his head.

After a moment he feels Mash settle against him on one side, and Fou nestle against his hip; and the tap of a brief footstep he can’t actually determine, except that it isn’t Ritsuka leaving — there aren’t enough footsteps for that.

Other than that, he can’t figure out. He chokes on the weight in his chest, tries to breathe; mostly manages. He hears someone else’s footsteps distant — has enough room in his mind to think, detached and numb, _Oh lovely, someone else gets to witness this_.

He doesn’t hear who it is: only Ritsuka speaking low, and that someone else leaving.

Fou abandons his hip, and it makes him feel cold; and there’s a moment of panic, of _Not Fou too_ which makes his breath catch in the most jagged-edged sob possible without actually shifting the lump in his throat to release. Soon after that someone presses themselves against that side, anyway, so he’s flanked by warm comforting weights, with an extra settled on the tops of his shoes.

He assumes the one on his other side is Ritsuka.

He doesn’t know who else it _would_ be.

He just wishes this damn weight in his chest would _move_. All his grieving — he thought he’d _done_ all his grieving. Maybe that was stupid to think. They’d been in the middle of a crisis, and he’d been trying to lead them, and that didn’t leave much time for thinking about who he’d lost. It didn’t leave _any_ time for walking through the halls he’d once walked, thinking of the _friends_ he’d walked with —

The weight in his chest comes up, hard and heavy and aching in his throat and his head; and he sobs for it and the crushingness of its pain. The worst thing is that it isn’t even going away, with the tears: it’s just sitting there in him, getting a little smaller and a little smaller still, until it’s at least not pulling all the strength from him just to exist, like some cancerous parasite.

The tears don’t exactly run out — so far they seem nowhere near _running out_ — but at least for the moment their reserves are too low to reach critical mass, and finally he manages to raise his head to rest it against the wall. His face is hot; his hair hangs around his eyes and he feels gross and blotchy and just generally horrible.

Jeanne’s back is in front of him, a few feet away and in the doorway leading to the gym, patiently turned into the room. It takes a few moments for Romani to realise that she’s making sure no one else comes out this way.

That makes him sob again, but just once, and on an exhale. He closes his eyes and tries to take a deep breath. It sort-of works. The horrible weight in his chest decides to lodge itself under his heart instead of in his throat.

“Sorry,” Ritsuka whispers. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea …”

Romani swallows hard and shakes his head without lifting it from the wall. “I didn’t know I’d —”

Stupid, stupid. He should have known … he’s a _doctor_ , for crying out loud.

He takes a breath and doesn’t _mean_ to say anything, but he — he can’t stand the thought that they might think he’s _just this lame_ , that just going somewhere new-old would make him break apart like this. That he might be just this much of a coward. “It’s just that the last time I was in this room was —”

Someone’s hand covers his. It’s Mash’s, he’s pretty sure, but his sense of direction with his arms wrapped around his knees isn’t a hundred per cent.

“It’s okay, Doctor,” Mash says. “You don’t have to —”

Romani shakes his head again, more forcefully. He wants to — all of a sudden, he _wants_ to. No one … no one here really remembers anymore. Not many.

“He was my friend.” His voice comes brittle and cracking, like shards of ice. “We studied together. He was my friend. He was —” He struggles with the words of it, closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to try and navigate the input, or the burning itch in his eyes. Just let the tears come, fine; just — don’t make him have to look at anything. “I didn’t know he was — but —”

 _He was my friend, even when he was Flauros_ , is what he wants to say, but the words lock up in this throat and he doesn’t know how to make them come out. The 72 had been belligerent, contentious — they’d been _demons_ , full demons, with all that entailed — but oh, they hadn’t been _evil_ , not the way people think of evil, as having no redeeming qualities at all.

He doesn’t know how to explain the nights where he couldn’t sleep, or forgot to sleep, when he watched the rainbow colours of clairvoyance painting themselves on the walls of his palace. He doesn’t know how to explain that sometimes the voices within had seemed like the only ones who understood him; that he spoke to them, all of them, but most of all he spoke to those who led the rest —

Flauros had been his friend.

Goetia had been his _friend_.

Even as he knew that something might happen … in his first lifetime, his only friends had been … even _Makeda_ had been …

That’s why the Incineration had been his fault.

He had shown his _friends_ what he thought humanity could be, what they were helping humanity become; he had given them his body and then he had _died_ and he hadn’t — done enough. He hadn’t done enough to help them to continue understanding.

He hadn’t known how to love his _friends_ enough to stop them from falling.

“They were my friends,” he manages finally, as tremblingly broken as the last, and he feels more than hears Mash’s in-drawn breath by his side.

“They —” Ritsuka cuts herself off before the words get any further, and there is a heavy, horrible pause.

“Doctor, I’m sorry,” Mash whispers. “I didn’t — we didn’t know. Senpai?”

Ritsuka doesn’t answer at first, and Romani doesn’t know what she’s thinking. She must be thinking badly of him, she must be — what sort of man has demons for friends; what sort of man has friends who would do that to humanity? Panic flutters in his chest as he realises that while not wanting them to think he’s totally lame, he might instead have made Ritsuka think something even worse.

But —

It’s the truth. And it hurts, right now; it’s always hurt, but he’s always managed to keep his eyes on what has to be done to _stop_ them. And now he doesn’t have that.

There’s nothing to move toward.

There’s just the aching tangle of guilt and grief and betrayal lodged in his chest.

Romani presses his face against his knees and tries to breathe. Mostly they come out as soft noises he can’t seem to contain; something whimpering, something pathetic, like a wild animal that needs to be put down.

Ritsuka’s arms fall around him, one over his shoulders and the other around his knees, and her head rests against the back of his.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice thick with tears. “I’m sorry. We had to stop them — you know it. You did it. But I’m sorry we had to stop them, when they were your friends. And I’m sorry that things couldn’t be different.”

The heavy weight in his chest shifts again, and its movement seems to force the tears back up again; but this time when Romani cries he feels like it’s draining something in him, at least a little. Enough that he can cry and cry into his knees and not feel like it’s just making him hurt more and more.

Eventually they run out. Eventually, and Ritsuka is still there holding him as much as she can.

He hates himself a little for that, needing her comfort, when she’s the one he’d sent out over and over to fix up his mess —

Someone’s talking.

“O Lord,” Jeanne murmurs, “bear this man in Thy hands; give him comfort in his time of sorrow and grief. Bear his burdens so that he may rest —”

A fresh wave of tears at least comes without the painful weight in his chest. They’re the tears of a raw, tired nerve being prodded, not something actively stabbing. Romani tries to close his ears to her prayer, and can’t; so he just sits in it instead, slowly feeling the hard floor under him and the equally hard wall at his back, and the sodden heat of his face against his knees, and the awkward gangly warmth of the girls against his sides.

It’s enough.

It’s enough.

Romani stirs with a breath and lifts his head again, and Jeanne murmurs “amen”; but she doesn’t turn, only keeps her face resolutely toward the gym — mostly. Her face is angled just enough, before she turns away, that Romani sees the shine of light off the tear-tracks on her own cheeks.

That puts a lump in his throat, again; the knowledge that someone weeps for him, someone other than Ritsuka. He didn’t know — he didn’t know how that would feel. He had made an active and persistent effort to avoid Jeanne, before.

Ritsuka stirs, lifting her head and her arms and straightening up with an _oof_ to stretch. “I’m hungry again,” she announces to the hall at large. “I think a snack is in order. Maybe not in the cafeteria or the kitchen, though.”

“Your room doesn’t have a big enough table, Senpai,” says Mash.

“I know, but Doctor Roman has the kotatsu. And his office desk is pretty big, in the infirmary. I think I want a blanket, though. And heat. There's a blizzard outside, Mash, it’s easy to get cold. I really need to warm up my feet.”

Ritsuka’s babbling, but it’s the determined sort of babbling where she has a destination with this and _by golly she is going to get there_. Despite himself Romani laughs, and it’s a vague watery thing which takes him by surprise as much as it does anyone else. Ritsuka pauses and then beams.

“See? Kotatsu. I bet Fou would appreciate it too.”

“Fou!”

“And we can ask Uncle Vlad to meet us there,” says Ritsuka, getting to her feet and putting her hands down to give Mash help getting up. “There’s no reason he can’t do some measurements in the doctor’s room. Anyway, I’ll bet it’d help him to see the doctor’s clothes that don’t fit anymore, right?”

“Right,” says Mash, sounding brave in that way she does when she feels Ritsuka’s logic is thin, but she’ll go along with it — at least for now.

Romani takes another breath, and uses the sleeve of his coat to wipe off his face. There’s no getting around the fact that he’s been crying, and a _lot_ — even with this complexion, it’s going to be obvious as they walk through the halls.

Maybe they can walk fast enough.

Maybe no one will care.

Maybe people will care enough to pretend they didn’t notice.

“Doctor?”

They both hold down hands for him to take, and they both pull him to his feet with more considerably strength than two teenage girls should strictly possess, and they both put themselves under his shoulders to keep him upright, looking up at him all earnestly helpful.

That puts a lump in this throat too.

Maybe he should just take up sign-language, at this rate … He just can’t seem to be able to talk most of the time it’s really important.

“Thanks, Jeanne,” says Ritsuka, and Jeanne turns and smiles, shameless of the tears open on her cheeks.

“It is my pleasure, Master,” she says, and bows to Romani, more deeply than is really warranted, and that fact puts a flutter of panic in his chest before she even says anything. “If you have a need of aid, Your Majesty, please don’t hesitate to call on me.”

His head jerks a little in denial — of the title, not the offer. He manages to turn it into a wordless, throat-closed nod before she sees the first part. This is why he’d been avoiding her … this is the kind of vibrant faith he has no idea how to fulfill.

But she doesn’t wait for a response, doesn’t seem to need one; instead Jeanne only straightens, and nods to Ritsuka. “I’ll attend to that task and let you know of the result, Master.”

“Thanks, Jeanne,” Ritsuka says again, and thankfully Jeanne heads down the other way, the way they hadn’t come. There’s another exit over there. Maybe she just doesn’t want to make things awkward. Romani really, really hopes she just doesn’t want to make things awkward.

“Fou.” With a flick of his tail Fou draws their attention and trots to wait expectantly by the door leading out of the recreation wing.

“Coming,” says Mash, and the both of them nudge Romani with a step, so he really has no choice but to follow where they lead him.


	4. When hopes and dreams are far away

They go back to Romani’s room, and Mash calls Vlad on the private intercom. Ritsuka’s face is drawn and a little pinched, like it does when she’s trying to figure out a difficult problem — not the maths kind. Romani doesn’t have the energy to ask. He’s pretty sure what it’s going to be about, anyway.

But the kotatsu is nice, and Romani sits at it with his legs drawn up under the table, as much as they can be; and he rests his head on his arms and closes his eyes and breathes for a little while, trying to imagine that none of this is real, that —

No. That’s stupid. It was always impending, wasn’t it? He never really had a choice about that. Pretending it’s not real just means it hasn’t happened _yet_.

It’s not fair he can get another chance like this and mostly get pain.

“Mash, where did you put the grill?” Ritsuka calls.

“It should be in the cupboard, Senpai.”

“I don’t — oh, wait, here it is. Are there any mandarins?”

“I can ask Uncle Vlad to go past the kitchen and get some?”

“If he hasn’t left yet, sure. And — tea, tea, where’s the tea — we kept the doctor’s stash of tea in here, didn’t we?”

“Most of it, I think …”

“Most of it?”

“I — I may have taken a bag or two … just, you know, when I really needed them …” Mash’s blush is audible and Romani’s smile is unforced, but feels a bit stretched anyway. Mash sometimes drinks the kinds of teas Romani drinks, but not always.

He can hear and feel the activity around him, bringing things over to the kotatsu slowly warming. Fou wriggles his way under the blanket and his claws prick Romani’s knees through fabric as he squirrels his way onto Romani’s lap, circling and circling and flopping.

Romani listens and feels and does not, at this point, try to stop his eyes from prickling. Fine, fine. If it’s going to happen, the only way out is through. He knows this from when he first got reborn. He just — didn’t expect to have to relearn it again, or have to rely on teenage girls to pick up the slack while he fell over …

That’s never not going to feel like a stab, every time he thinks it. He really doesn’t like being a coward.

He doesn’t know how to change it.

Romani smells honey and matcha even past the protection of his arms, and hears the clink of a tea-set being set down, and lifts his head with a great stirring of hair and a breath, blinking damply down at the tea-set centerpiece on the table. Ritsuka smiles, a bit nervously, and that’s a weird look on her. Romani doesn’t remember her being much nervous except in genuinely death-defying instances …

“Mash says she gave this to you after she got out of her hospital room,” Ritsuka says quietly, and Romani feels another stab of warm pain as he gazes down at it.

“Yeah,” he manages after a minute. “She did.”

It had been for — his birthday, maybe? He’s pretty sure it wasn’t just a ‘thank you for keeping me alive’ gift; he wouldn’t have accepted it. But he does remember — something about birthdays, and Mash not having had one, and Romani in a moment of unthinking truth giving her his real one — the one for his first life, not his reborn one.

He’d looked it up, matched up the calendars, during one of his obsessive phases while he was recovering. He’d been reborn as a fifteen-year-old, not as an infant; but the date on his modern records were all of the Holy Grail War. It had never quite sat well. Maybe that’s just because it’d hurt. So he’d looked it up, and —

And blurted it out, because he’d been thinking how sad it was that Mash didn’t _really_ have a birthday, that the date she’d been grown hardly counted —

He’d forgotten.

Romani straightens up with a breath, wiping his eyes and looking around. “Where _is_ Mash?”

“She went to get some things,” Ritsuka says, soft and somber and Romani _really_ doesn’t like that, doesn’t like that he’s the one who’s done that to her. “Doctor … will you be okay?”

Romani flinches. He doesn’t mean to, but he does, and Ritsuka pauses and then goes on, her voice soft. “I just mean that — when you … the first time … Da Vinci said that you were only half-free, at best. That you’d — had a vision, and it meant you had to come here and save the world, because you couldn’t do anything else. You’re not that kind of person. But — I just …” She bites her lip and when Romani dares to look there’s tears in her eyes.

“What?” he asks thickly, because he cannot comprehend —

“It’s something Tristan said while we were in the Singularity,” she says. “Sort-of — we were talking about pain, there was a miscommunication, it’s just … Doctor. It’d really suck if we brought you back just so you had to live in agony all over again. That’s not a life, and I don’t — I don’t want to think that we might have —”

Oh. _Oh_. Realisation is a lightning-bolt of a chest-twist, but one that seems to lift the veil, and despite everything Romani laughs a little, scattered. He beckons Ritsuka to bend down some more, because Fou is still in his lap, and when she’s close enough he puts an arm over her shoulders and pulls her down the rest of the way, so she’s nestled into his side again.

It’s different this time. She’s not comforting him, he’s comforting her. This is the way it _should_ be, and frankly, after everything — he’s glad to be able to do this, for once.

“I don’t think you did,” he says thickly into her hair, and she turns and buries her face against his shoulder, settling against him more securely with her fingers hooked in his coat. “It just — it feels like this. The first time, I honestly wondered the same thing … not even because of that final vision I had. For a long time I could barely even remember it had happened, because I was having to deal with everything else. After a lifetime of knowing I was missing out — I still wasn’t prepared for what it meant to really feel my own emotions for the first time.”

“Was it really bad?” Ritsuka whispers into his shoulder, and Romani nods without thinking.

“Yeah, it was at first. Think of all your worst moments, coming at you all at once. All of a sudden, I could think back on how I’d lived and judge myself for it. And everything was — raw and new, and — well, you know how when a cut heals and the skin is all new, and if you scratch it just a little bit it’ll break? It was like that. The smallest things would set me off, again and again. I couldn’t even leave my room for the longest time.”

“What happened?”

Romani closes his eyes and thinks back on those days, how overwhelming it had been just to _live_ ; the certainty that he would never leave the crushing weight of all his grief and tears and the shock of being human, without the guidance of something he had depended on, even as he wished it away …

But he had survived. He’d done more than just survive. It’s a bit easier to bear the weight in his chest, remembering that, and knowing that eventually things would fade.

“I got used to feeling things,” he says, his voice husky. “They started to settle. My brain, my body — I got used to them. The hard things seemed less hard, and I started being able to see the little joys I’d been looking for all along.”

“Like what?”

“The rain,” he says, a million miles away. “The first time, it was the rain. We didn’t get rain in Israel — not like that. I could hear something rushing outside, but I didn’t know what it was. When I went to the window —” He laughs suddenly, another scattered thing, and breathless. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, honestly. I knew what rain was, but — that kind of water just sheeting from the sky in droves … I think that was the first time I went outside. I had to _be_ in it. And it felt good, to stand out like that. Alien. But good.”

“And then?”

“And then it got a little easier.”

She breathes for a minute against his shoulder, and he can feel his clothes getting damp; but what the hell. He’s already made them damp himself. Romani doesn’t make her move, and finds himself idly stroking her back with the arm around her. He’d used to do this for Mash, once upon a time …

“And you think this is — like that?” she says finally, her voice a little choked. Romani nods.

“Yeah. I didn’t —” His throat locks up and his vision blurs in an instant hit of grief. “I didn’t have time, with everything going on, to sit down and — I did sometimes. It just … forces itself out, every now and then. I guess I’d forgotten that that isn’t really enough.” He swallows, and swallows hard again. “I forgot I’d have to … deal with all of that stuff I wasn’t thinking about.”

“And you don’t have that — clairvoyance stuff now?” He exhales against her hair, thinking of the quiet rainbow strains from Mash knocking on the door, and feels Ritsuka go rigid. “You — you do?”

“Not like that,” he says quietly. “Nowhere near like that.”

“Good,” Ritsuka says fiercely, burrowing back into his shoulder. “Because I was just seeing what the nameless king was and it _really sucked_. My head was ringing all night, y’know. It _sucks_.”

Romani laughs softly and strokes her back some more. “It really, really does.”

They sit like that for a while, and Romani feels a little better — enough to wonder if this is something Ritsuka had planned, or if she, for once, had just been an ordinary girl in need of some comfort … ah, he really hopes it’s the second one …

“I really didn’t mean for you to have to bear that burden like you did,” he says quietly, before he can stop himself. Ritsuka barely stirs, and only nods.

“I know.”

“I don’t want you to think that you can’t put it down sometimes.”

She exhales against his shoulder in the same way he had, in the way that speaks of an answer she has to choose carefully because truth isn’t something he’s going to enjoy hearing. Romani nods.

“That’s what I thought.”

“I don’t know if I know how to be an ordinary kid anymore,” she confesses.

“I know.”

“I’ve been in _war-zones_.”

“Yeah. You have.”

“Sometimes I think about going home and I just —” Her voice cuts off and she struggles for words, and Romani strokes her back while her breathing gets heavier, until she can find the ones she’s looking for. “Sometimes it feels like there’s a past-me and a now-me, and the difference between them is so big that when I look at what made the differences, it’s too big to really carry.”

“I know,” Romani says quietly, “exactly what you mean.”

“You said you didn’t mean for me to carry that all on my own,” she says, “but you had to carry it all on _your_ own.”

Romani laughs and it’s sudden, self-deprecating. “Ah, that was my choice. Da Vinci thought I could have said more … Magi*Mari said I should tell you all the truth.”

Magi*Mari — who’d been Merlin. Who hadn’t even shown up to help Ritsuka at the end —

Romani’s not going to think about that, and Ritsuka is talking, anyway.

“Well, if you wish that you could have supported me better, maybe this is the way I can support you. By taking on the hard stuff. It’s really hard to tell your friends they’re wrong and stupid … I’ll bet it’s even harder to have to stop them when they’re refusing to back down.”

… Oh. That’s — that’s what they’re talking about now. Romani swallows hard. “A lot of people seem to be able to manage fine.”

“A lot of people don’t,” says Ritsuka, “and that’s okay.” She sits up finally to look at him very seriously with tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, and her most determined face. “Heroic Spirits aren’t all Heroic because they’re brave or they’re fearless or whatever, Doctor. Sometimes, Heroic Spirits are remembered for other reasons.”

 _Like being cowards?_ he wants to ask, and doesn’t; but she seems to read it in his face, and her eyes narrow. But he still doesn’t say it, and she can’t be certain, so she keeps going with what she’d been saying instead.

“Like Merlin.”

Romani feels his face shifting and can’t prevent it, but isn’t sure what Ritsuka’s seeing when she stops and looks at him with a furrowed brow. “Well, he’s not exactly brave, is he? Not like some other Heroic Spirits.”

“No, that’s true,” agrees Romani softly. He really doesn’t want to be thinking or talking about Merlin right now. The subject of that particular mage has always rubbed him the wrong way; but even more now, where he can feel on the edges of his emotions a kind of budding panic if he’s forced to look at the fact he’d been talking to Merlin all that time and —

Nope. Not thinking about that. Not thinking about it.

Ritsuka gets the hint, anyway, or maybe he’s just starting to look panicked, because she changes the subject. “Anyway. I think you’re too hard on yourself, Doctor.”

“I think you need to stop trying to save people,” Romani grumbles, and belatedly realises how that sounds. He huffs and shakes his head, and tugs her hair. “I just mean that — you’re allowed to put things down too, Ritsuka. I know what it is to carry the burdens of the world, and I didn’t have a choice in that. Don’t do the same thing. Remember it’s okay to lay down.”

The only reason he feels okay saying that is because he’s pretty sure it’d take a lot of effort to _get_ Ritsuka to lay down. Metaphorically speaking. He’s not just a coward advocating cowardice … he’s pretty sure.

“You’re a Master with a lot of Servants,” he says more quietly, “and a lot of things depend on you. It’s hard for you to _have_ peers. And, well, I don’t really count. But I think it’s important for you to remember how to be an ordinary teenage girl. And I think it’s important to remember that you’re allowed to step away for a little while.”

He’s not sure he’s getting all the words out right. It’s just — it’s _hard_ , when everyone around her is basically subordinate. It’s hard even for someone who’s trained to lead, and Ritsuka hasn’t.

But she seems to get what he’s saying, or Romani hopes so, because she nods.

“Okay,” she says quietly, and flings her arms around his neck and plonks herself down against him again, all dead weight enough that he squawks for almost being knocked over. “I’m doing that right now, then, so there.”

Romani laughs, and he’s still laughing when the door whooshes open and Mash comes back in. He hears her pause on the threshold, and then enter; and by the time she comes into his field of vision she’s smiling.

“I brought mandarins,” she announces, holding up the bowl like it’s the Holy Grail itself, and setting it neatly on the table. “We can get fresh fruit in now, Doctor.”

“It’s pretty great,” says Ritsuka smugly against his shoulder. “Fruit, veggies … I’m not talking those weird medieval grains, either.”

“Excuse you,” Romani grumbles, “some of us liked those weird medieval grains.” Sometimes it had been like a distant, almost-forgotten memory of home. Still kind of painful, a lot of the time, but worth it, to re-experience some things he’d taken for granted.

But he’s being laughed at again now, he’s pretty sure, though Ritsuka muffles the sound against his shoulder. Mash beams at them as she sits, and reaches for the tea.

“Tea, Doctor? Uncle Vlad said he’d be here soonish, but he had some things to do first …”

“Yes, please, Mash.” Dare he ask which Vlad it’s going to be? Does it make much of a difference? Maybe he’ll just — not know this one. He’d gotten a little used to surprises. Sometimes they could be fun.

Ritsuka squirms under his arm to face the kotatsu and hold out grabbing fingers toward Mash. “Hey. C’mon. Don’t tell me you forgot mine?”

Mash gives her a very long-suffering look and then reaches into her jacket pocket and hands over a packet of pocky as though she’s delivering some smuggled goods. “ _Please_ don’t eat them too fast, Senpai … It’s hard to get them here.”

With a gleeful cry Ritsuka snatches up the box and tears it open, without any indication at all that she’d heard; and Romani feels a laugh bubbling in his chest which doesn’t quite make it to air. That’s fine; it is. The weight of grief lingers in his chest still, nestled somewhere which doesn’t bear prodding; but for the time being, it’s okay, and bearable — even more than before.

Okay enough that when the doorbell buzzes, he doesn’t even jump, and lets Mash call out the welcome. The door slides open and Romani glances toward the mirror, hoping for a glimpse — or no glimpse at all, as the case may be.

“Ah, yes, I can see from here,” says Vlad, and it’s the soft-spoken one, all smooth cultured tones instead of hoarse gruffness made by years of carryingly shouted orders on a battlefield. “They are entirely too small for your shoulders, hm?”

“Right?!” Ritsuka sits up and picks up Romani’s hand to stretch out his arm behind her. “Look, it’s all bunched up.”

“My whole wardrobe’s like that,” Romani admits, wincing. “Just a little — small.”

“Hmm.” He feels more than sees or hears Vlad crouching to measure his shoulders from behind; and senses more than hears him rise and go to his wardrobe. “I shall need you to stand, Doctor.”

Doctor. Oh, thank goodness. Relief floods Romani’s chest so intensely that that alone makes his eyes prickle. He exhales and nudges Ritsuka away from his shoulder — and only belatedly remembers Fou at the claws digging in when he shifts.

“ _Ow_.” Scowling, Romani lifts the blanket to look at Fou’s eyes glinting in the darkness. “Excuse me. I need to get up.”

“ _Fou_.”

Laughing, Ritsuka reaches under the kotatsu to scoop Fou up and arrange him on her, much smaller, lap. “Come on, Fou, the doctor needs some new clothes. Here, you can cuddle me.”

“Fooooooooou …”

Fou doesn’t sound entirely happy with that, and Romani doesn’t know if there’s a reason behind it; but it sure sounds like he just wants to be on Romani’s lap instead, and that makes Romani’s chest inflate with warmth. He climbs to his feet and presents himself to Vlad’s critical eye. He’s done this once before, for Halloween, and to his great relief Vlad does not require him to undress; mostly assess where the changes have been.

“This won’t be difficult,” he says, rifling through Romani’s wardrobe like he has a right to it while comparing outfits to Romani as he is now. “At least, not for anything _I_ have made for you — I made sure to leave enough fabric to take the seams out, if necessary.”

“Why?” Ritsuka asks curiously. “I mean, you can’t have known the doctor would change bodies, right?”

Vlad gives her an elegantly arched eyebrow. “You _have_ seen the width of my younger self, Master, surely? If there is such variation between our two bodies, there is such variation possible for any other single individual. It would have been a waste of fabric to create something that would not be easily re-tailored.”

“Believe me, my inventory records and I thank you,” Romani reassures him. There had been a _lot_ of administration he’d had to keep track of, things he didn’t let the girls see.

“That was a consideration?” Ritsuka sounds startled and thoughtful at once. “How come I don’t get to see that stuff?”

“It’s not stuff you need to see, Senpai,” says Mash, and Romani pays more attention to their conversation behind him than he does to Vlad’s process of sorting through his wardrobe. “I sort-of knew it was there because I was on staff and I helped with some small things, but after the Grand Order was invoked the doctor stopped telling me about it.”

“Your job was to support Ritsuka and rest,” says Romani, a little severely, and Mash nods, unapologetic.

“Yes, I know. That’s why I didn’t mind. But now I’ve had to support Senpai from the command-room, and since you were gone, I’ve had to help out with a lot of those little things. It was definitely a big reason why we let Ishtar arrange her race. I’m not sure Da Vinci’s quite as good at keeping records as you were, Doctor.”

“Really?” Well, that’s — something, and makes Romani feel a little smug, enough that his smile is unbidden. “Hah.”

“I never knew any of that,” Ritsuka mutters, a little belligerently. “Why, how close did we get to running out of supplies?”

Romani winces. “A lot closer than I’d like you to know anything about, frankly. It’s fine; it was fine.”

“Why didn’t you _say_ something?” Romani looks at her in the mirror and she remembers the conversation they _literally just had_ ; and at least she has the graciousness to laugh, however sheepishly. “Oh, yeah … the whole saving the world thing. I guess it really wasn’t all that important for me, huh? But still …” She shakes her head. “We probably could’ve been more careful with some resources …”

“You were as careful as I needed you to be,” says Romani. “Being short on resources isn’t an excuse not to have fun when fun is needed.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ritsuka grins at him behind his back. “I guess I really didn’t want to know about that stuff, either.”

“Exactly, Senpai.” Mash nods. “Don’t worry about support. That’s our job.”

“Fine, fine!”

“Not all of these will be able to be tailored,” Vlad tells Romani, bringing his attention back to the wardrobe and the mirror. Romani looks at the racks of clothes and winces a little.

“Honestly, there’s more in there than I remember … I think a lot of them were things I wore when we were trying to impress the Mage’s Association …”

“Many of _those_ will be able to be re-tailored,” said Vlad, “I assume because they were tailored before.”

“Well, yes …” Most of them had been from before Malisbury’s death, when he’d insisted on providing those, at least. But that means a lot of shirts and ties, and Romani makes a face.

“It’s okay, Doctor,” says Mash. “Anything you won’t be able to wear, we can put in the quartermaster’s wing to be given out to someone else, and re-tailored for them. Right?”

“Yes, that’s true,” says Vlad, scooping up the armfuls of clothing he had deemed capable of being re-tailored for Romani, and giving Romani another assessing glance. It’s not quite that of a hungry predator, but it’s close, and Romani withholds a shiver. Vlad, he recalls, had always said he likes the presentation of his food to be optimal.

Maybe Romani will just not think about that too.

“I shall ensure you have something more appropriate to wear tomorrow, Doctor, and work on the rest over the course of the week.”

“Thank you,” says Romani in a rush of genuine relief, as much for the fact this was more painless than he’d been anticipating as for the fact he would, very soon, have _actual fitting clothes to wear_.

“They may not all be as you expect,” Vlad adds as he leaves, and that makes Romani pause; but before he can ask about _that_ Vlad is already gone and the door has slid shut behind him. Romani turns instead to the girls, knowing his eyes are a little wide and unable to do much about it.

“What did he mean by that? What did he mean?”

The girls exchange looks and burst into giggles, and absolutely refuse to answer his escalating demands that they _explain themselves_.


	5. And you feel like you can't face the day

The rest of the day is spent in innocuous time spent together. The together is the important part. The girls only leave his room in order to bring something back; and between tea and grill and mandarins, his kotatsu looks and feels and _smells_ just about as it had once upon a time.

He has to ask them if they can help him sort his clothes, sheepishly; anything Vlad didn’t take is only going to be taking up room. So that’s something they can do, right away: and the alarming thing is that Ritsuka seems to know exactly where everything is. Romani’s not sure whether he wants to ask about it.

“I’m the one who unpacked your room after someone packed it up,” Ritsuka explains, even though he _did not ask_ , but maybe his bemusement was showing just that much.

“Oh, so when you said you felt like you were going through your dad’s underwear drawers, you were speaking from experience?” Romani shoots back, his cheeks heating even as he says it. Mash squeaks, Ritsuka squawks, and they both burst into giggles. Romani manages to hold out for another second and then breaks into laughter, only _slightly_ edged with hysteria.

Ah, the thought that people — not just people, _Ritsuka and Mash_ — had been through his room is … not an entirely pleasant one. He feels a bit exposed by it all, even though he hadn’t had anything in here that any man of his age oughtn’t have. And he didn’t have a lot of things that modern men of his age _did_!

“I’m just not going to ask about the magazines,” Ritsuka says, and Romani feels his skin flush to the roots of his hair.

“I don’t — I _didn’t_ —” He splutters, and Ritsuka laughs.

“The _idol_ magazines, Doctor, I know you don’t have that other stuff!”

She looks a bit shifty about that though, and Mash’s giggles get a little more high-pitched, and Romani’s eyes narrow before he shakes his head. “You know what, I’m not asking. Just know that if you have any questions, I’m here.”

“Okay,” says Ritsuka in _far too cheerful a tone_. “The internet has been pretty conflicting in its information anyway.”

Oh, good, so he should just expect to be having the sex talk with Ritsuka at some point in the near future, then. _Fun_. Romani makes a note to ask whether Da Vinci, or someone else, might have handled that for either of them. The thought had occurred during the Grand Order that there might be some things that need to be said — but in the end none of them had been, with things moving too quickly and Ritsuka apparently unfazed.

… Romani never had asked what they’d seen in Singularities, though. Maybe he should check up on that. Just — to be sure.

Maybe when they’re not in his room _cleaning out his wardrobe_.

“Will you need new underthings, Doctor?” Mash asks all brightly professional, and Romani buries his face in his hands, and wishes he can sink right into the floor. Ritsuka’s cackle right after that makes him wonder whether Mash — dear, sweet, innocent Mash — had asked that on purpose just to get that very reaction.

“I’m going to have to ask some questions about your biological knowledge in the near future, aren’t I?” he asks, muffled into his hands. “Please leave my underwear drawer to me, Mash, I really don’t need help with that.”

“Okay!” Mash chirrups, and when Romani dares to look up he’s at least relieved to see he’s not the only one blushing. Where did she learn how to be so flagrant _even while blushing_ , he’d like to know —

Well, no, he already does. She’s redheaded and pony-tailed and even as he thinks she’s going through his sock drawer.

“If you take any more of those out, I’m going to run out of socks,” he tells her, picking up a pile of clothes they’ve already pulled out to spread across his bed and decide how badly he wants to try and keep them.

“You have too many socks with holes in them,” Ritsuka retorts. “I put them back before because they’re yours and — well, they’re yours. But you really need new socks, Doctor! Or at least learn how to darn them!”

“Well, we were short on resources,” Romani says defensively, and Ritsuka spins on her heel to hold up two left socks with holes in the toes and shake them at him.

“ _Darn. Them._ I learned how in Rome, it’s not that hard. I guess you had a lot more things to do than to worry about darning, though.” She spins back around to resume sorting through his socks. “Singularities can be a lot of sit around and wait, but you needed to keep on the transmission no matter what we were doing, huh? At least most of your socks are black, you can probably mix and match …”

She keeps chattering without needing Romani’s input, and he’s just going to be over here and be glad that he doesn’t have to answer. Also, glance in the mirror to see whether his blush is visible — oh, yep, it is. Look at that. Even brown skin can’t hide his embarrassment, apparently; it’s just not _as_ readily visible.

He’s just going to sit here and not say anything, Romani vows, at least until the blush has gone away.

* * *

Sometime in the course of the afternoon Da Vinci drops by, cheerful and with an actual gift basket of food.

“Emiya wanted me to give this to you,” she says, and plonks herself down on Romani’s bed and steals one of his mandarins.

“He did not,” Romani accuses her, while failing to hide his helpless smile as he puts the basket on the bureau to unpack it. It’s all easy food for dinner, or snacking over the course of the afternoon. He has to wonder who squealed that they weren’t leaving his room again.

“He did not,” Da Vinci agrees with shameless cheer, and looks around the room. “It looks worse than it did the last time you were here.”

“Hey,” Romani protests. “I’m a very neat person, thank you!”

Da Vinci blatantly ignores him. “What are you doing?”

“The doctor’s clothes don’t fit,” Mash explains, “so we’re trying to figure out what can go where, and to whom, and whether there’s anything worth keeping. Uncle Vlad’s already taken everything he says can be re-tailored.”

“Ah, and the rest is a matter of _style_.” Da Vinci nods and hops to her feet. “For this, you _definitely_ need a connoisseur of beauty! I’ll be glad to render my assistance!”

“I thought you had things to do,” Romani grumbles, but his chest is warm and Da Vinci flashes a dazzling smile at him.

“That’s what you always said, and it never stopped you.”

“Hey!”

But he’s laughing as he says it, and he’s glad she’s there. For one thing, it takes the edge off it being the two girls going through his wardrobe, even though he realises belatedly that this means he’s surrounded by women going through his clothes, and Da Vinci has the sharpest tongue among them.

Oh, well. She also has the keenest eye, and he knows a lot of his clothes don’t just not fit, but don’t look good. Case in point, when Da Vinci looks at him standing up and declares: “We’re going to have to give all your coats to one of the others.”

“But I like my doctor’s coats,” Romani protests, gripping it around him.

“Be that as it may, Romani, they don’t suit you anymore. Too sleek — they make you look sleeker.”

“I was _narrower_ before!”

“And that’s why they suited you! Now you’re too …” She motions at him with a critical eye. “… proportioned. The coats hid your gangliness before, now it’s just too much.”

Mash whispers, “Senpai, does any of that make sense to you?”

“Nope,” Ritsuka says cheerfully, rolling up Romani’s socks, the ones that aren’t in need of darning. “But I’m not a coinpurse of beauty.”

Romani can’t help but snicker as Da Vinci turns toward Ritsuka, sees her beatific smile, and decides to pretend that she’d been temporarily deaf instead. That means, of course, she turns back to Romani, and the lecture begins.

It’s the fun kind of lecture, though. The one Romani can be snide at, and protest; but secretly he’s glad for the professional opinion. He’d known some of these things would have to be set aside — and as long as he can argue with Da Vinci about it, he can pretend the idea that he might have to isn’t hurting.

The doctor’s uniform was something he’d earned … to set it aside is —

No. Add that to the list of things he’s not thinking about.

At least with Da Vinci’s help it means clearing his wardrobe takes, overall, less time despite her lecture, thanks to her efficiency and knowledge. By the time any of them get really hungry enough to sit down with the gift basket, Romani has a neat stack of things that will be getting dry cleaned and given to someone else, or put in stores for when they — inevitably, _hopefully_ — get some new staff in.

One or two larger items, Da Vinci declares redeemable, but she refused to say how or why and Romani is left with the intense feeling that he’s about to get used as a guinea pig for her, and possibly Vlad’s, fashion tastes.

His shoes are almost to a one a lost cause, at least for his feet, but most of them are in good nick owing to so much of his time being spent in the command-room and the fact that so much of Chaldea had been closed off. Most of his smalls are wearable, aside from the socks Ritsuka had ‘rescued’. Who, exactly, is going to darn those Romani doesn’t dare ask, but it’s an oddly endearing thought to imagine Ritsuka in a quiet moment darning socks and listening to music. He remembers her room being pretty sparse, still …

“I can’t believe you have so much _stuff_ ,” Ritsuka complains as she flops by the kotatsu, flinging her arms out and sprawling on the floor like she’s had to walk the whole length and width of France all over again in this mid-sized room.

“I’ve been here for quite a few years, don’t forget,” Romani reminds her dryly, looking around ruefully. “Ah, I was probably due for a spring clean … I didn’t even remember some of the things in the back of the wardrobe.”

Some of those things had been redeemable — the vests, the sweaters with enough give to stretch, remnants of the English winters. He hadn’t worn most of them since he finished med school and left England to come to Chaldea.

“At least you won’t be able to wear that horrible shirt again,” Da Vinci says cheerfully, and points to a dress shirt she had absolutely hated and he had — well, not liked nearly as much as he pretended, just to get on her nerves. “There’s no way that colouring will suit you now, and even you have to admit it, even if the sleeves _had_ still fit.”

“But you’re okay with me keeping the _Hawaiian_ shirts?” Romani objects, eyeballing those. “I looked washed out in those.”

“I didn’t even know you had anything like that, Doctor,” says Mash, following his gaze with an alarmingly contemplative expression. Romani feels himself reddening again.

“It was a holiday,” he mutters.

“A holiday where?” Ritsuka asks, propping herself up on her elbows. “You can’t exactly wear shirts like that here!”

“No, but Australia is mostly summer and sun, and when Lev and I were on the way in to —”

He gets half the sentence out before his mouth locks up on him and he freezes, trying to swallow and mostly failing.

“I’ve seen pictures of Romani on the beach,” Da Vinci confides in the girls smugly, as if this is some big secret. “Turns out, it was an annual thing for some of the senior staff to head to Australia during the summer, for their break. _I_ never went, of course, but Romani —”

Mash and Ritsuka look at each other, at the Hawaiian shirts, and back at each other; and then they burst into giggles.

“Shut up,” Romani mumbles, his cheeks warm and throat a little croaky, but at least working; and the smile that wants to make itself known proves that he doesn’t mean it. “I’m not the one who picked the beaches.”

“I’ll bet he burned like a lobster,” says Ritsuka gleefully.

“Oh, he _did_ ,” Da Vinci assures her, and leans in conspiratorially. “And yes, for the record, he did wear his gloves into the water.”

The girls erupt in mad giggles as Romani makes some strangled wordless objections, but it’s hard when he’s laughing too. “Ah, I got _so many_ weird looks for that … It took a couple of years before people stopped asking, and by then they just thought I was the biggest germaphobe!”

“We all did, Romani,” Da Vinci assured him. “Especially because you kept changing your gloves.”

“Well, I had to keep up appearances, didn’t ?” Romani says defensively, and Mash takes a deep breath, wiping her eyes under her glasses.

“How come I didn’t get to see any of these pictures, Doctor?”

“I showed you pictures of the beach.”

“Yes, but none of them included you!”

“I was the one behind the camera,” Romani lies, and the women look at each other and break into giggles again. Reluctantly, Romani grins.

The conversation thankfully turns to something else other than a subject that threatens to prod the things he’s not thinking about. The trips to Australia had been — well. they’d been before the Grand Order. Some of them had been before Malisbury’s death, some after. The idea that Lev had been there with them, even after —

No. Not thinking about it. Not _thinking_ about it.

“I might need your help some more,” Romani says to Da Vinci at a convenient break in the chatter, and she tilts her head almost bird-like, with that mysterious smile.

“Oh? Some more?”

“With my — things,” Romani explains, kind of badly, and gives up trying to figure out how to word things tacitly. “It’s my aftershave. I’m not sure it suits anymore. It could just be my senses changing, but —”

Da Vinci looks thoughtful. “No, that’s a good thought. Scents change as people do. Of course, as long as you still like the scent I shouldn’t think there’s any reason to stop using it …”

“Well …” He’s not sure he does. Brains change too.

Da Vinci gets to her feet and beckons him. “Come on. Let’s take a look at your bathroom, Romani. I’m delighted to know you trust me with such intimacies.”

Romani lets out a strangled noise, but it’s mostly resigned, since he’d been the one to ask in the first place; and he gets up and follows her into his bathroom. With the door open they can still hear Mash and Ritsuka chattering, with Fou occasionally weighing in or demanding some more overt cuddles.

In the bathroom, Da Vinci turns and leans on the counter, and lifts her eyebrow. “Well?”

“Well … what?”

“Come on, you didn’t _actually_ want my advice on your aftershave, did you?”

“I did,” says Romani defensively, and then adds, a little more meekly: “I also just wanted to ask — well —” Now that they’re a moment in private, he’s really not sure how to go about it. As long as Mash and Ritsuka are talking, they shouldn’t be able to hear, but …

Da Vinci waits patiently while he struggles with his words. “Mash and Ritsuka,” he asks finally, motioning a little. “Are they — I mean — is there a conversation I should be having with Mash in the very recent future?”

He’d been joking about it, before, but — well, he has to wonder; and at the question Da Vinci’s expectant expression dissolves into indulgent fondness.

“Well, I haven’t had the conversation with her, and I don’t think anyone else has,” she says dryly, “so, yes, there _is_ a conversation that needs to be had. As to Ritsuka — I’m fairly sure they haven’t had sex yet, if that’s what you’re worried about; and it’s not as though you’ll need to be concerned about pregnancy for either of them, so I imagine that takes some degree of pressure off.”

Romani’s face is steadily building red, and he’s sure she knows it — sure she keeps talking just to keep it building.

“Yet,” he says. “ _Yet_.” He turns on his heel, peers out through the door to make sure they’re both too busy giggling to be listening, and pointedly presses the button to close it. If they need anything, they ought to be able to knock. Then he stands there for a moment to exhale, gazing down at his brown, tattooed hand resting on sleek metal, and feeling the weight of everything he’d ever chosen not to do.

“I never had that conversation with her before,” he says quietly. “With so much on her mind, and the fact that she was terminal, it never seemed — pertinent. Or the right time. I wished that — but it wasn’t really relevant.”

He hears Da Vinci straighten up, the click of her heel as she comes closer; and he’s not sure what he expects, but what he _gets_ is her arms folded around his chest and her chin on his shoulder — or as much of his shoulder as she can reach.

“Then this is more about your regret then about Mash,” she states, as matter-of-fact as anything, and Romani cringes. Her grip tightens briefly. “It’s fine to have regrets, Romani.”

“I didn’t think I’d have to worry about them, after the fact,” he says, and laughs a little. “Ah, that’s even more cowardly, I suppose.” Running away from his responsibilities, running away from even having to feel the burden of emotion for his choices by dying …

He really hadn’t expected to have to deal with all of this after the fact. He hadn’t planned for any of it, even in his head. It just … hadn’t been a thing. At least that final burst of clairvoyance had told him something to aim for, however horrible; but now he’s not sure where the path is beneath his feet. Or if there’s something to find.

“Romani.” Da Vinci’s chin digs in a little. “ _Do_ remember this is your first day back. You don’t need to solve every problem, or even have a solution ready, right now. Mash and Ritsuka have been going fine all on their own. I’ve been keeping an eye on them. Yes, a conversation would be a good idea for both of them. But it’s not urgent, and that’s not why you wanted to talk to me, is it?”

… It isn’t. Related, sort-of; a lead-in, a segue. But not really it. For a moment Romani’s throat locks up and he’s not sure what to say; but mercifully he at least doesn’t start crying, only has to be conscious of his breathing for a bit.

Da Vinci only shifts to rest her head against the back of his shoulder, and nothing more; she waits, patiently, until he can find the words.

“I don’t know where I’ll fit in here again,” he says finally.

“We _are_ in need of a medical chief, you know,” says Da Vinci, less dryly than her words imply.

“I know, but —” He struggles for a minute.

“But that’s not what you are, now?” she suggests, and Romani nods mutely, his hair pulling for the fact that it’s caught between them. “You are, you know.”

“I’m not —”

“Oh, you’re a little more than that, it’s true,” she interrupts calmly. “And it’s probably going to be difficult, having to walk around with everyone knowing who you _were_ , who you sort-of are again, the things you _can_ do — and the Mage’s Association is going to be an absolute nightmare.” Romani laughs shortly, and it’s starting to turn watery. He really doesn’t want to think about that right now, but at the same time he’s glad he’s not the only one who thought of it. “But you _are_ still a doctor. All of that knowledge didn’t just go away; it’s still your name on the degree. So what if your picture is a bit different? We can update our records, and when your hair is cut you’ll look a little more like you did. That should be good enough for anyone.”

“The Mage’s Association says Romani Archaman is a pale redhead,” says Romani. “And my passport, and — _everything_ — _”_

"All things to be solved,” Da Vinci agrees, “but not today. And we do need a medical chief, and you do have the knowledge. Everything else is secondary. Why don’t you say what you really want to say, Romani?”

As if all he needed was an order, the words come out, all light and easy in his mouth as they hadn’t been in his throat. “What if people want more from me than I want to give?”

“There you are,” she murmurs, and her arms around him squeeze again. “Then you tell them ‘no’. It’s as simple as that.”

“The Mage’s Association —”

“We’ve been doing just fine without the Mage’s Association,” says Da Vinci. “It’s been a little tight, I admit, and sometimes power is an issue — but those are things you can help with directly. To be honest, I’ve been debating whether or not to even _tell_ the Mage’s Association that you’re — well.”

Wait. Romani blinks at the door, and it takes a few tries to unstick his throat. “You mean you haven’t —”

“Well, we submitted preliminary reports,” says Da Vinci, “and those reports state you missing in action presumed dead, but they don’t directly link you to Solomon, no.”

For a few minutes Romani can’t move to really comprehend that. The fact of Da Vinci using that name, connecting him to _that person_ out loud and shameless is still surreal enough, without what she’d actually said. His brain keeps ticking over and rebooting, and finally when he takes a breath it’s only to laugh. And laugh.

… And laugh a little more, painfully and leaning on the door, with Da Vinci clinging stubbornly to his back like a burr. “They might not even _know_?!”

“They might not even know,” Da Vinci agrees. “I thought I’d leave it up to you what you wanted to do; goodness knows they’ve been dragging their heels for so long already that you’re sure to have at least a couple of months to think it over. We can always make something up about your palette swap — magical accident, some kind of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey thing.”

“I wasn’t a mage before.”

“Temple of Time and explosions,” she says cheerfully. “You weren’t a mage, now you are, fancy that, done and dusted — honestly, there’s so many ways we could spin this, it would probably even be _fun_. You don’t need to be Solomon, Romani. You can _just_ be Romani, and only those of us here will know, if that’s what you prefer. You won’t even have to tell them ‘no’, in that case.”

Romani leans his head against the cool steel of the door and closes his eyes on tears that mercifully haven’t fallen, and for a few moments he has to stay like that, breathing and trying to untangle the emotions all clawed and thorny around his heart.

“I don’t know,” he manages finally. “Eventually — _eventually_ we’ll get more staff. We’ll have … people here again. Finances. Sure, we’ll have to be subject to outside forces again, but — I don’t like the thought of … of having to hide. All over again. I …”

He doesn’t have words for how dirty that makes him feel, how duplicitous; how it fills his stomach with cold dread, of having to pack up everything that he was and pretend that he isn’t, _again_. It’s not just that it feels cowardly — it also feels as if he … he can’t go back. Like Ritsuka had said, about her past life and her now life, and the difference is too big.

He’s not sure he could pack all that away.

Help him, he’s not even sure he _wants_ to. Not now that Mash and Ritsuka look at him and see no one worth judging. Not now that Da Vinci can hold him from behind like this, _still_ , the way she had when he’d been sitting in his chair, staring at a screen and pretending he wasn’t crying while she pretended she wasn’t having overt and public emotions.

If they can all still look at him like he’s someone worthwhile having around, he wants to — to be that person. One that’s worthy of their regard.

He doesn’t want to be the person who lays down again just because it’s more convenient, always working under full capacity.

“Then we figure out how to tell them,” Da Vinci says quietly, “and go from there; and we don’t have to do it fast, or in any way until you’re really ready. Anything else that happens, happens, and in the meantime, Romani — you decide how far you’re willing to be pushed. You’re good with territories. Make that one of them. There’s no reason to be anything other than what you _want_ to be, right here, right now, no matter what anyone else says.”

“You would know,” Romani says, a little roughly. Summoning a Heroic Spirit, and off the dais stepped a beautiful woman with jewel-encrusted clothes and a Mona Lisa smile. Da Vinci had always ever been whoever she wanted to be, right here, right now.

“And don’t you forget it,” she says, smiling into his back; and she pulls back finally to let him breathe out some of those tangled emotions while she goes to open the cupboard over his sink. “Now, you said you wanted my advice on your aftershave …”


	6. When darkness is upon your door

That night it gets worse again. That night after the girls have left to go to bed, after Romani has sidled around not wanting Da Vinci to leave; after Da Vinci had told him, with exasperation, to go to sleep already, she’ll stay for a bit longer, honestly, look at the mess all of you made …

She’s no servant, but she can be a _Servant_ , just for now.

That night, after he’s fallen asleep, and woken again to find the room dark and lonesome, and he’s shivering in his bed for what he doesn’t remember in his dreams. He doesn’t always remember his dreams. He remembers —

 _“Come on, Romani, are you_ trying _to be late?”_

 _Lev’s voice is made of exasperation, and Romani grumbles as he loiters, moving only_ slightly _faster than he had been._

_“I don’t see why I have to wear this,” he complains, plucking at his shirt._

_“Because you said you would,” says Olga, hands on hips and looking him up and down with a visceral kind of satisfaction. A_ vindictive _one. “We made a bet, and you lost. Come on, Romani, at least be gracious in defeat.”_

 _“Oh, like_ you _ever are!”_

_“I am too gracious in defeat!”_

_Lev, laughing, gets between them before they can really get going. Olga glares and Romani grins sheepishly. “Now, now, we’re not the only ones here, and whatever will the others think if they see the director’s daughter and his chief medical officer acting like children in the middle of an airport?”_

_Oh, yeah. Romani’s glance darts around at Sydney airport, and he wills his shoulders to relax a little more. “I still don’t see why I had to wear this,” he whines again, plucking at his Hawaiian shirt. “Look at me; I look like a pasty-faced_ tourist _.”_

 _“Romani,” Lev says patiently, patting him on the head. “You_ are _a pasty-faced tourist.”_

_“Hey!”_

_Olga laughs and it’s not her nervous titter but the deep belly laugh she stops doing very quickly, because she thinks it’s unlady-like, or something. But there’s something bright in her eyes as she grins at him, and takes her suitcase’s handle to wheel it toward the exit._

_“And don’t forget, Romani,” she calls back, “you_ promised _you’d stay still for pictures this time! Last time, Father wasn’t convinced we’d even got you to the beach at all!”_

_“HEY!”_

_Lev follows her laughing, and Romani picks up his suitcase with a grumble, but he can’t quite stop his face from smiling, and he follows after them toward who only knew what they’d planned._

He remembers, when he was alive, dreams were visions and visions were dreams, and there as no way to tell the different between the two; and when he retired to bed he would see the future strung out before him in a tangled mess of choices, and the past laid out all orderly like a row of beads counting. Not immutable — but orderly.

As a king, his dreams had never been dreams.

As a man, his dreams have always been nightmares. Things looming in the dark, what he doesn’t know about to catch him out — things he _can’t see_ , can’t track, and failing everyone around him for lack of knowledge …

These dreams aren’t that.

These dreams don’t look into the future and panic for the darkness of sightlessness.

These dreams look into the past and see the neat rows of pain, all cutting just to look at them.

_“Romani, as a friend who studied magecraft with you, let me give you some advice …”_

Romani wakes up crying and with sharp edges of weights in his chest, hardly able to breathe for them, hardly able to move. When he rolls over in the end it’s because his body starts ringing alarm bells that it isn’t getting enough air; and he rolls hard and cough-sobs into his pillow. The air starts to move somewhat.

The pain doesn’t: it’s all tangled up in his chest and lungs and throat and sinuses, and when he breathes he can’t seem to withhold the soft animal whimper of something direly wounded.

 _“Romani, as a friend …_ ”

He gets up in a scramble of sheets and hair, staggers toward the door — trips over the kotatsu edge and barely notices the sharp edge of pain in his shins from colliding with the corner of it. He goes down halfway, catching himself on the wall and sliding the rest of the way, breathing too hard and trying not to let it all out — not like this, not in here …

_“It’ll take you two minutes to get here from the infirmary, tops.”_

Many of the rooms look the same, except what people have added. Many of the rooms are modeled exactly the same, like his, and Ritsuka’s, and a single out-of-the-way refuge where he’d hid with nerves jangling, knowing knowing _knowing_ but not able to point, not able to say _this is who and how and when, this is where the world will end —_

He needs to get out. He’s _suffocating_.

Romani stumbles toward the door and it buzzes open, and he’s out of his room before he has thoughts to think, gasping for air and gripping the wall of the corridor. The door slides shut behind him, and he stumbles away from it, no real idea of where he’s going. Just that it’s not _there_ , where memories are haunting.

His whole body keeps trembling too hard to straighten, so Romani keeps his grip on the wall and slides along it with his shoulder against steel as if it’s the only thing keeping him up. It is. He’s not sure where he’s going, almost falls into the intersections; picks himself up again, keeps walking.

There’s something rainbow in the light, all dim for Chaldea’s manufactured night-time; something faintly scattered in the way the panels in the floor guide footsteps. Sometimes it’s left, sometimes it’s right — he follows it, because it’s the only thing to follow.

It’s so faint, that rainbow knowing, and something desperate in him has to find where it should have been — where he can know and say it had been Lev — before Olga before Malisbury before _everything_ went away.

The strains of rainbows end in an open doorway, bathed in light; and it’s not until Romani gets there, stumbling over his hair so he can’t even lean against the jamb, that he realises it’s the gym. The lights are on: but it’s empty, either for chance or opportunity or just the _greatest_ of luck, or the grace of —

_“You have lost the grace of our king!”_

Everything in it is still to the eye, but when Romani looks out over it he sees the movement the room seems to encompass, in its very nature for a place of activity. Some of the things are different than they were, and they seem like pockets empty of life, compared to the rest. Over there, there used to be some hanging bars … it’s been repurposed with open space. Over here, that corner, is where —

_“Ah, slacking off again, Romani?”_

_Romani jumps like he’s been struck by a live-wire, and Lev is already laughing as he turns, sheepish and defensive and rueful all at once._

_“Someone else was using the bicycles,” Romani says with as much dignity as he can muster — which is to say, practically none at all. He kicks his magazine under the bench, hoping it’ll get lost in the rest of his gym gear, but Lev only grins and bends to pick it up, and wave it in his face._

_“Funny place to catch up on your reading, Romani. Anyway, the bikes are all free_ now _, see?”_

_“I wasn’t at a good stopping place?” Romani hedges, glancing toward the bikes. They are, indeed, all free — every single one of them, damn it, even the one without any squeaks, broken dashboards, or unfairly cutting pedals. Lev, of course, takes that one, which is probably fair since Romani had been loafing around anyway._

_Lev always looks different, in the gym, outside of his suit and in gym clothes, with hair pulled back into a man-bun. Romani feels gangly and awkward and alarmingly pale beside him; his hair’s never consented to staying in a bun, so even tied up it sticks to the back of his neck once he’s got going._

_Which is one of the many, many reasons he avoids ‘getting going’ as much as possible._

_“You’re going to fail one of your own physicals these days, if you keep neglecting your fitness,” Lev says, without even looking up as he programs the bike for a stupidly steep incline._

_“I am not,” Romani objects, and reties his hair, and reluctantly moves around to take the bike next to Lev, since Lev being here means Romani looks EXTRA lazy and bad, rather than just someone who’s cooling down after a workout. Anyone getting within five paces would know he’s nowhere near sweaty enough to have even begun, of course, but with Lev as a comparison it’s just that much more obvious from a distance._

_“Really? When’s the last time you were in here?” Lev’s laughter is a glittering thing, something bejewelled and dangerous, like a velveted glove. Sometimes Romani really isn’t sure about him, but he’s also never done anything that could be construed as bad. The opposite: in university he had been one of the very, very few willing to stop for a gangly young genius and offer a hand to someone who had been not a mage, among mages._

_“I’m in here all the time,” Romani grumbles, and pokes unenthusiastically as his bike’s controls. Ugh, who came up with this idea, anyway? Staying fit was so much better when you didn’t have to set time aside for it. Not that Romani ever did anything super physical anyway, but he had a_ palace _! A palace with a lot of halls! A palace which —_

 _Well, was probably about the size of Chaldea, honestly, and Romani might just have to declare that just_ walking _around this place was adequate for his fitness, thank you very much — but Lev is laughing at him again, with that easy grin, and Romani grins back reluctantly. He can’t stop and leave right now; it’d look super lame. He knows it, and Lev knows it, and they’re both just going to sit in their knowing._

_“Come on, Romani, ride a little with me.”_

_“Oh, fiiiiiine.”_

Romani takes a step, and it shakes but it holds; and he doesn’t realise, really, that he’s done it. He doesn’t realise until he’s already over there, leaning on the bicycle with his chest constricting and his body tight, and pain crowding up through his throat.

Breath comes with sound, twisted keening things — pain trying to make itself physical, and locked behind his throat through some sense of privacy or self-preservation. Or maybe just loneliness, the emptiness of the gym making it seem like a sacred place, like a library, where sound cannot be used to disturb.

Romani rests his head against the bars and tries to breathe, and mostly manages whimpering; and it seems to go on forever. Isn’t pain meant to ease, after a while? Isn’t it meant to become easier, meant to start loosening his grip? He’s sure he remembers that —

Something cold in that particular way of dead things and impendingly-dead things touches his elbow and Romani jolts away from it, and the bike, and slams hard against the wall. The bench is hard and invasive under his knees until he sinks down into it for lack of any strength at all. The being standing by the bikes takes up the entire row, all looming ghostly-blue and —

And that is a very big dog.

Very big, very _phantasmal_ dog.

For a few seconds Romani is silent if only because his breath has been stopped in his throat, and his mind is blank. He can’t — what?

Why is there a phantasmal dog in Chaldea?

Where did —

The dog looks at him and there’s something in its eyes which makes all the hair on Romani’s body turn to goosebumps; it’s an arresting gaze, a paralysing gaze, and Romani can’t even being to move as the dog steps forward, paws silent on mat.

It sits, still looking at him, and rumbles in its chest, and it’s almost the exact same noise Romani is vaguely aware he’s been making: a kind of twisted whine of pain. The sound of it seems to open Romani’s throat so he sobs again, without much control or desire over it.

The dog makes the sound again, a small whine full of pleadingness which resonates all the way into Romani’s chest as if he’d made the sound himself. Just like that his throat and chest unlock and Romani flings himself on the phantasmal, gripping fur tight and burying his face in the phantasmals ruff to scream and let all his pain known, without having to try and hide it or pretend that _it isn’t there_.

The dog’s back rumbles, and shoulders shift as it lifts his head and howls, a sound that echoes like a grim bell all through the gym, vibrating right down into Romani’s bones. Romani’s screams seem pale in comparison, and it feels like permission — like he can scream and cry and wail and shriek and it’s okay, because this phantasmal, whatever it is, shares his grief and helpless rage, and at least it’s not something they’re suffering _alone_.

Romani screams into the dog’s fur until his voice is hoarse; he cries until his face is raw and chafed, until not every breath is a restraint of pain, until he feels so limp and wrung-out that he can do no more than turn his face to make sure he can still breathe, even still buried in fur. He weeps until, sometime during, he falls asleep from the exhaustion of grief, and doesn’t dream. Not the memories he had before, at any rate; he remembers phantoms in the darkness, old fears lingering, but that’s at least something he can sleep through, by now.

Through the hazy mostly-sleep, the dog’s howl reverberates, a constant refrain of agony which, finally, peters away, leaving behind only weariness and some vestige of emptiness. It’s not exactly a release, but maybe — maybe.

* * *

“Do you think we should wake him?” is a whisper Romani only half hears, because he’s still mostly asleep; but aware enough to be drifting, to know that he’s resting in the curve of a giant body, with something fluffy across him.

“If you’d care to take your chances, be my guest,” says someone else, very dry and proper British, and sounding like every single one of the stuffiest old white male professors Romani had ever had while he was studying magecraft. And a lot when he’d been studying medicine, too.

“Hmm. Well, I don’t have a lot of skin to spare, but — you know what, maybe …” The voice drifts off and Romani listens dully to a footstep, and Ritsuka’s voice sounding cheerful.

“Hey, Lobo, do you think I could get in th—” There’s a snarl and a snap of teeth, and a ripple of muscle under Romani’s head and chest, and Ritsuka’s voice cuts off into a squeaking blend of young-girl turning to baritone-man. “Ohhhhh-kay, well, that definitely didn’t work.”

“That,” says the British professor, “might be the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

“Hey, Pops, don’t blame me. You’re the one who created him, you know? The least you can do is take some responsibility.” There’s a snap of fingers. “Oh, wait — no, you can’t, because that’s literally your reason for living, is avoiding responsibility.”

It’s not directed at him, but Romani still manages to feel a dull stab of guilt and shame at the accusation. The professor doesn’t seem nearly so cowed; his tone is frosty as he replies: “One does not become as famous as I if one simply accepts the status quo.”

“And by status quo,” says the first voice, “you mean the whole ‘murder is bad and people will try and make you pay for it’, right?”

“An _assassin_ is lecturing _me_ on morality?”

“Hey, when I kill someone, I _know_ I’m breaking the rules. I don’t go around trying to convince people the rules don’t exist, you know?”

“Do the two of you ever shut up?” asks someone else, and this voice pings recognition somewhere under the dull blanket of numbness. A woman, sounding cold and even, the sort which is calculation and drive and an utter lack of consideration of extraneous damages —

A voice which is sideways to one he’d known even before then.

Recognition reaches critical mass and Romani jolts upright in a waft of hair and a panicked leap of his heart to his throat. His vision is grainy and wet but he sees her first, sitting on one of the bikes opposite, feet on the frame and sword braced tip against the floor, and expression unamused.

Romani blinks. She’s wearing street clothes.

But yes, he knows who this is. “Artoria?”

His voice is rusty. She gives him a deeply unimpressed look. “Ah, you remember. This is your fault, you know.” Romani flinches. “The Greater Grail, the twisted Holy Grail War — I wouldn’t have been birthed from that Singularity if it weren’t for you.” Romani flinches again. “Don’t expect thanks.”

“… I won’t,” Romani says thickly, and rubs his eyes with his bare arm, since he doesn’t have anything else. He’d gone to bed in the scrubs he’d been wearing the night before.

His vision cleared, his breath catching, he looks around to the half of the gym he doesn’t have to twist much to see. It’s no longer empty, but no one’s using it for its intended purpose. The doors are closed, something slumped against them; Romani thinks at first it’s an empty suit of armour missing its helmet, but then it stirs with a clank, and settles again. No one’s getting in, then, apparently?

And the rest of the room immediately visible —

The British voice he’d heard has to be the dapper gentleman seated on one of the benches like he’s in an armchair in his living-room. Loitering over his shoulder is someone wearing way too few clothes and way too many tattoos — more, even, than Romani, and isn’t that sad — and the only reason Romani knows up-front that he’s a man is because of the lack of a shirt. He grins hugely, like a snake without wickedness, and waves with a crinkle of his fingers.

It’s not many, not that he can see, but they make Romani wish that the gym was empty again. Artoria is the only one he recognises offhand, and only for her face and her sword; her demeanour is otherwise the opposite of Saber, whom he’d once fought, whom he had spent _considerable time avoiding_ , after she’d been summoned during FATE trials after Fuyuki.

“So this is him, huh?” 

Movement out of the corner of his eye makes Romani’s head jerk, and a woman unwinds herself from one of the other pieces of equipment, all long limber grace; and this is someone Romani recognises too. The Dragon Witch of Orleans is difficult to forget. Even more difficult to forget when she saunters up to him to lean down, examining him from close-in with a long drape of hair and completely blocking Artoria from his sight — and the opposite.

Romani hears Artoria sigh, and Jeanne Alter’s mouth curves in a viciously vindicated smile, and she doesn’t pull away.

“So you _are_ the one responsible for all this.” Jeanne motions to herself. She’s also wearing street-clothes, Romani sees with detach. He’s pretty sure that’s not what she’s motioning at. She straightens. “Funny. All this time, and you were right here, in amongst us all — I guess it wouldn’t have solved anything if we’d just killed you.”

“He was necessary to stop Goetia,” says Artoria, and it would be a statement but her tone is too flat not to be hiding emotion.

“I know _that_ ,” Jeanne snaps, whirling at her.

Oh, great. Romani always had managed to avoid getting between these two … Ritsuka’s always been better at handling the internal Servant squabbles. Even _Da Vinci_ had been better at handling the internal Servant squabbles. With the way everyone reacted to him, Romani figured he was better off staying far away.

Now he’s about to wind up in the middle of one, and he can’t do anything to stop it, or even try to escape it. Everything in his brain is happening entirely disconnected from his body, apparently. Even a half-hearted command to ‘move’ gets totally ignored.

“Yeah, bitch-fight,” says Emiya, but his voice is twisted and ugly, with laughter in it, and when Romani looks it’s not the Emiya who’d served him shortcake just twelve hours ago. This is someone else, someone who looks like he’s been torn apart and put back together, but only barely.

“Ladies,” murmurs another voice, and this one is also unfamiliar; and Jeanne moves off with a huff, patting Romani’s head.

“Well, I guess this is about what we both can expect from God, isn’t it? Good boy.”

The fur under Romani vibrates with a warning growl, but Jeanne’s already moved away, too far to reach. The fur, Romani realises with same detach, is the phantasmal he’d half thought he dreamed. It seems like a dream, when he thinks: ghostly and half-there, not at all solid.

Solid now. It’s definitely fur under him.

Belatedly, his heart stings for Jeanne’s jab. He really doesn’t know what she means by that, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Jeanne Alter always had thrown out words like spears, uncaring how many they were because there were so many that at least one of them had to hit.

With her gone Romani can see the other side of the gym. The unidentified voice belongs to a man seated on a bench across from the dapper British gentlemen, fingers steepled and gaze steady on Romani’s face. Somewhere in the distance he can hear Erik murmuring something half-sung, which isn’t unusual; but it’s unusual that he’s here, of all places, in public and with others around — especially this lot.

Especially this lot who _stares_.

Romani stares back, too tired to feel ashamed or flustered. It’s been a while since he’s fronted up to someone like this, and he can’t remember having done it since he was reborn.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” says the man smoothly, and he visibly pauses. “Do you prefer Doctor, or Majesty?”

“Doctor,” says Romani automatically, without even a wince. No one’s asked him that yet … except Ritsuka, in Jerusalem. He expects to feel something out of it, but mostly he just feels — numb.

The man inclines his head. “I am Sherlock Holmes. I assume you’ve heard of me.”

On most people, the last would be arrogant; in this case it’s matter of fact, a genuine assumption — but an accurate one. And a revealing one. Romani’s gaze drifts around the gym again, and finally the street-clothes Artoria and Jeanne are wearing make sense.

“Yes,” he says eventually, his gaze elsewhere than Holmes: on the dapper gentleman. “You must be Moriarty, then. You sound like it.”

Moriarty frowns. “I _sound_ like it? Whatever does that mean?”

“Like a privileged old white man.”

The assassin laughs so hard he coughs, although that might be affected, given how Moriarty’s gaze turns toward him, looking so genuinely hurt that for a second Romani regrets his words. “Good grief,” he mutters. “And they say Servants manifest in their _prime_ … old. Good _grief_.”

The assassin laughs again, and salutes, a quick two-fingered thing. “Heya. So you’ve gotta know me, then?”

Romani stares, and honestly, he’s _trying_ , but he doesn’t remember Ritsuka using this man’s name; only a nickname.

“… Sassy-shin?” he ventures eventually, and this time it’s Emiya who laughs, and the assassin who frowns.

“Jeez,” he mutters, “there’s no escaping that, is there? Damn. Guess you’ve already talked to Master, then. That big lump behind you is Lobo, by the way.”

The fur at Romani’s back rumbles, low and warning, and Sassy shrugs.

“What are you all doing here?” Romani asks, because his mind is still blank on that front: he can’t imagine why this kind of group of … mostly villains … would be doing in the gym where he had an epic meltdown.

Artoria points. “We heard Lobo howling, of course. Why else?”

“Why _you_?” Romani clarifies, because if they had heard Lobo howling surely the whole of Chaldea had too.

“Lobo doesn’t always howl in a way that’s audible to most people,” says Holmes, and indicates the room. “Those of us here were in Shinjuku. I suppose it’s left its mark. Shakespeare dropped by, incidentally, but he didn’t seem to think there was much interesting about a man sleeping, so he left again muttering about his writing. That was before the doors were closed.”

Romani feels a stab of panic, sharper than the previous ones had been. The numbness must be wearing off. And he really doesn’t need Shakespeare to start writing about him.

“Why are you _still_ here?” he asks, unable to think of anything else. “I can’t imagine most of you found watching a man sleep interesting.”

He isn’t sure he wants to know what Sherlock Holmes saw from it.

“Personally,” says Sassy, “I wanted to know what kind of king could dominate Lobo.” There’s a deep, more audible snarl of a rumble behind Romani. “Hey, I’m just calling it as I see it.”

“I don’t dominate Lobo. I’ve never even met Lobo before now.” Romani thinks for a second, and then adds, “I’m not a king.”

“Anymore,” Holmes corrects. “Some say that isn’t the sort of title from which one can escape.”

“I’m not a king,” Romani repeats stubbornly, with panic fluttering in his chest and clawing at his throat.

“Curious,” Holmes murmurs, and sits back. “Well, perhaps you can simply serve us with information, then. Has Master mentioned the Remnants?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t know a _lot_ , but he knows _enough_ , that some of the demon-god pillars had escaped, and — and his throat closes up, and tears are a sudden encroaching thing. Some of them had escaped. Some of his friends —

No. Not friends anymore.

_“Romani, as a friend who studied magecraft with you …”_

“Aw, shit, he’s crying again,” Jeanne complains. “He’d _just_ stopped that, too. What kind of pathetic idiot cries in his sleep, anyway?”

“If it bothers you,” says Holmes without turning, “you can always leave.”

Damn it. _Damn_ it. Not just a crying fit, but a crying fit in front of _these people_ — Romani scrubs at his face, tries to swallow the tears, but mostly that just makes him hiccup. A huge head twists and Lobo lets out a thin narrow strain of a whine, one that makes all the hair on Romani’s body stand on end. Lobo’s nose prods Romani’s head, the dog whining into his hair, and Romani shudders. That is — the most _awful_ sound.

“Even demon dogs will seek out a pack wherever they can find it, it seems,” Artoria notes clinically. “You were making sounds just like that. I suppose it takes an animal to call another animal.”

“Ouch,” mutters Sassy, and Romani takes a few deep, shuddering breaths, and covers his face with his hands. Does he have any pride left?

No. None. He draws up his knees and buries his face in them, so he doesn’t have to look at them all. “If you’re not here for a reason, please go away.”

“Love to,” mutters Emiya, “but every time we go for the door the Hessian pulls out his sword and Lobo starts growling. So, yeah, fix that, would ya?”

The Hessian. Of course it is. At this point Romani just can’t even be surprised. Ritsuka had been vague about the giant wolf, and its rider; but now he remembers that she _had_ mentioned them as a unit.

“Please let them leave,” he says sideways. “This isn’t the kind of company I want.”

Romani feels the heavy weight of Lobo’s head on his, and for a moment — just a barest instant — he can almost feel like it was, like words are hidden in the motion of tail and the sigh of breath, the rumble of throat and the flicker of ears.There are shades off it, as if he’s viewing it through refracted water, or upside-down: it’s not like it was, with the rings, where a bird’s tweets were a lifesong on its nest, or a cat’s yawn a study in complicated subtleties that would bring Japan to envy.

But he feels the deep yawning despair and hollow aching loneliness, and the aimless wandering for something that is no longer there. It meets the ache of grief in his heart and brings it up until he starts crying again, this time uncontrolled and painful sobbing into his knees, and he doesn’t know how to stop it.

In the distance, armour rattles. He hears Jeanne make a satisfied noise. “ _Finally_. I’ll stab you later, bitch.”

“You and what army?” Artoria shoots back with edges in her tone, but if Jeanne responds Romani doesn’t hear it over the shifting of people starting to rise, and the sudden silence as Erik stops singing.

“You gonna stay here?” he hears Sassy ask.

“Yes,” says Holmes.

“Need me to get Master?”

“No,” answers Holmes, in exactly the same tone, and then nothing more.

Then there’s silence, aside from the clutching pain rasping Romani’s insides, and the sobs that accompany them, and Lobo’s long ragged mourning howl.


	7. And you feel like you can't take any more

Romani doesn’t know how long he weeps for this time, but it leaves his throat aching and his face itchy enough that if he had the energy he’d tear it off. He has no handkerchief, but his face has been pressed so hard into his knees that it doesn’t matter; the scrubs have taken most of the grossest of fluids.

Dimly Romani thinks he should probably get up and go to his room if only to _change them_ , because wearing them at this point is super gross; but that means actually … getting up. He can’t seem to uncurl, let alone rise. The tears don’t seem to be purging anything at all, just making the pain of his reality sharper and more twisted every time he cries for it.

“Are you still awake?” Holmes asks eventually in a relatively disinterested tone. Romani stirs with a breath just enough for even a less-than-world-class detective to know the answer. “Ah, good. I suspect you’ll want to stop clinging to Lobo if you can, for the record. Lobo’s story is a tragic one, and I suspect that he’s making your grief worse, not better. Phantasmal, after all.”

… Oh.

Romani, for a second, debates this; debates whether or not he has the energy or the will, to just get up and make this lump of meat _move_ — the activation of such intent is so hard at the best of times, let alone a time like right now …

But before he’s even finished the process of thought, Romani stirs, uncurling slowly to crawl away from Lobo’s warm bulk and instead rest sideways against the bike which had triggered all this to begin with. Romani rests his hot forehead against the cool bars of its chassis, and breathes.

It does seem a little easier, like this; but he can’t tell if it’s the difference between having made an active choice or removed himself from a location that was doing him no good.

“There,” says Holmes, and Romani slits open his eyes to watch Holmes not look at him. “That should be better, I take it?”

Romani intends to answer, he really does; but his voice is raw enough that nothing comes out, even in the attempt. Lobo stirs finally, getting to his feet and stretching, all elegant bulk in what ought to be a tight space. Romani can feel him looking. Even with his face turned away and his eyes closed, he can _feel_ Lobo looking, the eyes of a creature from across a great span; and Romani cannot tell if he’s saying ‘ _I will come for you’_ or _‘We will meet again’_.

Neither of those options are particularly alluring thoughts — but only one of them would be actively lethal. He doesn’t know.

“M’sorry,” Romani mumbles against the bar instead, even though he’s only barely aware of what he’s sorry about. That he did have to drag himself away. That he can change and Lobo can’t — that Lobo, after that odd and frightening attempt to _help_ , is still alone in his grief and loss, because Romani can’t live like that. Because that isn’t _living_.

Lobo doesn’t acknowledge it, anyway. Maybe he can’t, anymore. He only brushes past, padding toward the doors. Romani doesn’t hear the moment his footsteps fade. He’s not entirely sure he’s heard any footsteps at all.

“Good work,” says Holmes briskly, and his tone finally jars something loose in Romani’s head, enough to make him open his puffy eyes more properly and rest his cheek against the bar so he can’t look up at Holmes.

“Are you doing that on purpose?”

His voice is as scratchy as a ruined CD. Holmes doesn’t even look up.

“Doing what, precisely?”

“You sound like Malisbury.”

This _does_ make Holmes look up, and he looks for a moment startled, then thoughtful. “No, I wasn’t. How interesting. I suppose he was, after a fashion, a man of calculations. Though, of course, when _I_ died it wasn’t real.”

“Yes it was,” Romani objects.

“It wasn’t _lasting_ ,” Holmes amends, and waits a beat for Romani to answer; but Romani doesn’t. Honestly, Holmes’s presence as a Servant should be impossible. It says a lot for the strength of human belief, the way humanity could get so incredibly invested, as to make the fictional real. “I mean, of course, that I had a safety net when the stakes were quite so high.”

“Malisbury did have a safety net,” Romani says quietly with his throat closing on him. “It just didn’t require him to live.”

Holmes looks at him again, a long assessing look which would be more alarming if his eyes were distant with thought. “Ah, I see,” he murmurs. “Of course, he would have entrusted a great deal to you — even non-magical as you were, at the time. It’s a curious thing … I said once that he was an ordinary man, with very ordinary dreams. And yet, it takes someone rather extraordinary to entrust his life’s work to someone else without any hesitation. Very, very curious.”

This seems to be mostly muttering to himself, so Romani doesn’t answer. He grieved Malisbury a long time ago — he actually had the _time_ to grieve Malisbury, to grow accustomed to the fact that no one knew, that he was alone even in a crowd of people.

As fragile as he is now, it feels heavier than it usually does even when it springs at him unexpected. It still does that, sometimes.

Holmes doesn’t seem to _need_ Romani’s conversation, at any rate; he writes in his little book, occasionally humming to himself something that starts as words and ends as notes. Eventually he looks up again, as if Romani hasn’t been watching him for who-knows-how-long.

“I don’t suppose you do have any information on the demon-god pillars?” he asks matter-of-factly, and this too is a weight — but at least not one which inhabits his chest and tries to cast everything else out.

“I don’t know who survived,” Romani says roughly. “I wasn’t — I didn’t see.” He’d been human going into Ars Paulina, and too occupied with Goetia to see the remains of the rest; and by the time victory had been properly secured, Romani had already been … elsewhere.

“That’s a pity,” Holmes murmured, and writes something else in his book. Finally he closes it with a snap, tucks it into his coat, and turns on the seat to rest elbows on knees facing Romani. They must be a sight, Romani thinks, and laughs a little without any air. He’s like a broken thing, and Holmes the scientist examining him.

The laugh trickles off into a sigh, and Romani turns his head so the bar isn’t pressing into his temple so much. “Is that all you want?”

“I told Master you couldn’t be trusted, you know,” says Holmes, very calmly.

“I know,” says Romani, also very calmly, and without opening his eyes. “She told me.”

“You don’t seem particularly put out by it.”

Romani sighs again, a heavy one that helps his body start moulding into the bike’s chassis. It’s not totally comfortable, but moving is too much effort. “You think you’re the first Servant to have looked at me or heard my voice and declared, ‘That is a man not to be trusted’? At least you backed up your assertion with legitimately compelling facts.”

“Hm.” It isn’t a sound. He actually _says_ : “Hm.” And then goes on, a beat too late to be really the same conversation. “I didn’t enjoy the realisation that there was something out of my control making me think so. Instincts are a finely honed device, and mine were being influenced without my knowledge.”

“To be fair,” Romani says without opening his eyes, “on a technical level, I’m the one who influenced it.”

“Your fingers do seem to be in nearly everything,” Holmes notes, and then, finally, he gets around to what he’s _there_ for. “If I were to tell you that I have a hypothesis that you cannot die, what would you say?”

Now _this_ , Romani has to laugh at. It starts as a soft thready thing and slowly grows momentum, an avalanche of a sound too deeply pained to be hysterical. Romani bends into the bike, laughing and laughing until there’s tears on his cheeks again and the ache in his chest is for the forcefulness of air, not the stubborn clinginess of grief. Holmes says nothing until he gets a grip on himself, gasping.

“Old news,” Romani manages after a moment. It isn’t, it’s not even remotely; but someone had got there before Holmes, and to be honest, right here and now that’s the very _last_ thing on his mind. It’s something to think about — it’s definitely something he’ll have to _reconcile_ — but right now …

Right now, the idea that it might be a priority is simply ludicrous.

“Good,” says Holmes. “That would have been awkward to have to explain. I haven’t told Master, yet, if that’s a concern.”

That serves as an effective slap of cold water, and Romani catches his breath. “Yes. I — please don’t tell her. Or Mash.”

It’s not that he’s afraid of them knowing, but — something of such deceptive magnitude, he’d like to actually have thoughts about himself first. Especially with Ritsuka so worried that they might have brought him back only to suffer. No, he doesn’t want her feeling like they’ve condemned him to something worse.

“You can tell Da Vinci,” Romani adds after a moment, “but if you have to. I’ll — get around to it. I just … I need to think.”

“If it becomes relevant,” Holmes agrees, “to the retrieval of the demon-god pillars, then I shan’t hide it from Da Vinci. I have another question.”

There’s a beat of expectant silence, and Romani can’t tell whether it’s a genuine pause for insight or an attempted courtesy in case Romani has an objection. Like asking which title Romani prefers; Holmes hasn’t actually used _either_ of them, yet, nor seems inclined to even call him by name. So Romani says nothing, and Holmes goes on.

“What do you intend to do now?”

Now. Right now, right here on the floor of the gym like the most pathetic being in existence? Or general now, as pertains to Chaldea? Greater now, as pertains to the demon-god pillars? Universal now, as pertains to his potential immortality — oh, there’s the twinge — and his absurd surfeit of power now unleashed upon the world, and no longer restrained by the Root?

“Need more data,” says Romani, muffled into the bike’s wheel.

“I’m attempting to ascertain if you’ll be a liability,” says Holmes, and Romani hates that he feels pathetically grateful he doesn’t say ‘threat’. Liability isn’t much better — but liability at least doesn’t have everyone thinking he’s trying to destroy the whole of humanity.

“Oh, probably,” says Romani, and even to his ears he sounds tired, and resigned, and hopeless. “The only thing wise about me was the voice speaking through me, after all. I wouldn’t be surprised if I messed things up somehow, without that.”

There’s another brief pause. Romani hears Holmes shift, and his footsteps; but instead of walking away, as Romani expects, they get closer, and he feels more than hears Holmes crouching beside him. When he opens his eyes and turns his head, Holmes is peering in close and clinically, like he’s watching something under glass. “Hm.”

He said it again. It isn’t a sound. Romani looks back, and says nothing.

“I’m told it gets better,” says Holmes.

“I know that.”

“Then why aren’t you acting like it?”

Why isn’t he acting like it.

Why is he just — laying here, like this, a pathetic creature on the ground of a public room …

 _You all hated me,_ is an answer, and it’s true. Having to suffer blow after blow like that of the giants of human history — it’d put him on the ropes, again and again, knowing that even Da Vinci … even the heart of the knight inside of Mash … Those ones had cut, especially.

But it hadn’t stopped him. And in the end — in the end, Mash had replaced those words with an earnest call of _“Dad, please!”_

 _I don’t know what I’m aiming for,_ is another answer, and it’s just as true. He doesn’t — he doesn’t know anything. Nothing about what he wants, what he needs, except …

Except that he wants to be _here_.

And here he is.

Rather pathetically so.

And he doesn’t have to stand for that anymore.

Romani exhales and the bike’s steel mists with his breath. Finally he stirs, and pushes himself slowly to his feet, like a mountain deciding that it, too, must move; and he has to lean against the bike, drunk on tears and sleep and emotions, before his balance asserts itself.

“Ah,” says Holmes, “there you are.” He reaches out and with unexpectedly fussy, crisp motions he straightens the shoulder-seams of Romani’s scrubs, and brushes his hair off his shoulders, and finally looks Romani in the eye. “Never forget, Doctor,” he says, “that this, too, is a choice.”

And then he leaves — just like that, leaving Romani standing, mostly, on his own, and finally, mercifully, alone.

Romani leans on the bike for some minutes, breathing. His cheeks are wet again, but he almost hadn’t noticed, so the tears are on their own merit and at least not taking everything in him to escape. He knows he should move, he just —

It feels hard to step away. He’s not very good at moving forward, without something to look ahead and aim for …

“Romani.” Da Vinci’s voice is exasperatedly fond, with edges of genuine concern, and he feels her hand on his elbow, and finally stirs. He’d bent over without realising, his head on the handlebars; his back aches as he straightens, and looks at Da Vinci wordlessly. It’s not that his throat won’t let him talk, this time; it’s just that he has nothing to say.

She looks at him and nods briskly, and tugs more gently at his elbow. “Come on. Let’s get you back to your room, shall we? You need to get some more sleep.”

“I’ve slept,” says Romani, and it falls flat of the indignant belligerence he once could have managed. But he doesn’t resist being guided away from the bike, even though letting go of it feels oddly like he’s letting go of something he won’t be able to find again. He’s not sure how much of that is a metaphor and how much of it is the subtle strains of clairvoyance that still seem to be lingering.

He really hopes it’s not going to start gathering into something bigger.

At least Da Vinci’s grip is solid.

“Not enough,” says Da Vinci, a little condemning.

“Not enough —”

Oh, the sleep. In all of ten seconds, Romani had forgotten.

“Please, Romani, you never got enough even when you really needed it. Obviously, you haven’t gotten enough now. You’re a doctor, aren’t you? What does your education have to say about sleep debts?”

Quite a lot, and most of it things Romani had mostly ignored, because he really didn’t know how to solve the problems he was having and it’s difficult to go to another doctor and say ‘Hi, I’m the reincarnation of an ancient Israeli king and I keep having nightmares about it’.

“I know how sleep debts work,” Romani grumbles, and it sounds marginally more human.

“I’m unconvinced,” Da Vinci announces, and they exit the gym. She shakes her head. “I don’t know why you _wanted_ to come here, anyway. Ritsuka told me what happened yesterday.”

Of course she did.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Romani says, which is the truth; but he realises belatedly that that means something different for him than it might to her. “My clairvoyance directed me here.”

Da Vinci stops them both at that, and Romani leans against the wall and rests his head back, wondering if he should maybe have sat on that until they were back in his room —

Too late, now. Oh well.

“I thought you weren’t clairvoyant anymore,” she says, very seriously and searching his face. “As I recall, your medical scans indicated nothing — hm. Nothing like _that_ , anyway.”

“It’s not like it was before,” Romani says quietly. “I don’t know how much Ritsuka’s mentioned —”

“Enough,” says Da Vinci, in a tone which stops any explanation, and Romani’s thankful for that, that he doesn’t have to _try_ and describe what it was like for him.

“It’s not like that,” he says again. “It’s just — like sunlight off a stray piece of glass, or a distant song you can only just hear. It’s not even all the time, or most things … it’s only happened twice. I knew when Mash was at the door, and last night, when I needed to get out of my room, I followed it here.”

“You _followed_ it,” Da Vinci murmurs, but it’s not a question, and she shakes her head and sighs. There’s at least partly a laugh in it, but it’s not the humorous kind. “Ah, Romani, and here I’ve heard that most clairvoyants would consider twice in one day to be a _lot_.”

“It’s not. It’s nothing.”

“As to _following_ — well, I’ve never heard clairvoyance described like Lassie before, that’s all.”

Romani laughs and it startles him; it’s watery and thin but it’s true, and he lifts his head to try and push himself off the wall. The whole of his body wants to sink into the floor … his knees are mostly solid but he doesn’t trust them, all that much. He has the vertical strength of wet paper right now.

“Maybe we should give it a name,” Da Vinci muses as she takes his arm again, letting him lean on her and guiding him through the doors. “Lassie _does_ seem to be appropriate … what do you think?”

There’s an odd scraping noise as they walk; it takes _far_ too long for Romani to realise that it’s his hair on the ground, and the dull ache in his neck isn’t only for having been sleeping in awkward positions. He’s too distracted by that to answer her immediately.

“Hm?”

“Naming your clairvoyance,” Da Vinci repeats.

“Ah —” Naming his clairvoyance. Romani shakes his head. “I don’t know, I haven’t — it’d be funny, I guess?”

Da Vinci eyeballs him sidelong. “Hmph. Maybe I’ll ask you when you’re not exhausted. Come on, we’re not far now.”

‘Not far’ is relative. He seems to remember stumbling through the halls forever, last night. The lights are still dim, so that may not actually have been that long ago. At least it means there aren’t that many people to witness this, let alone the fact that most of them would be Servants. Aside from the ones who already have.

Neither of them say anything as they get to his door, but he’s leaning on Da Vinci more than he had been, and his step gets progressively more reluctant. If he had the strength to pull back, he would; but in the face of Da Vinci’s steady stride and firmness, Romani doesn’t even have the will to try. Despite his reluctance, despite his stomach flipping over itself, he lets himself be taken back into his room, where the nightmares are.

Just stepping over the threshold makes Romani’s throat close, and he exhales shakily. Da Vinci looks at him sidelong.

“It’s something about the room, then?”

“No, I —” Yes, it is. “It’s not about _this_ room,” Romani says after a moment, and it’s a struggle. “It’s just that — my room and Ritsuka’s have the same layout.” There’s a few different kinds, accounting for where rooms are squeezed into the facility’s architecture.

Da Vinci’s brow furrows. “So?”

“So I was hiding in hers when Lev …”

His throat closes entirely and he hopes, oh he hopes that this is one of the many, many times Da Vinci understands him without his having to find the words. She looks around at his room again, and makes a quiet noise of comprehension, and relief is a warm sweeping thing in his chest.

“So that’s what woke you up,” she says, which isn’t strictly accurate; but it’s close _enough_. Nevertheless, she takes a step further into the room, and brings him with; and another step again, navigating around the kotatsu. It looks off-centre … Romani vaguely remembers colliding with it in his scramble to leave. That explains the throb in his shin.

“Lay down, Romani,” Da Vinci orders, and he doesn’t so much ‘lay’ as ‘fold’, curling up on the bed even though he’d rather be — well, a few places else.

He sits up, very quickly and with a yelp, when Da Vinci tugs at the waistband of his scrubs. “What are you —?!”

“Oh, so you still have some sense of privacy, I see,” says Da Vinci with far too much cheer. She tugs again, despite that her fingers are clutched tight in Romani’s hand. “Come on, Romani, you’ve been crying all over your knees. The pants are gross. Take them off and I’ll get you another pair. It’s not like I haven’t seen penises before, you know — I used to have one, after all. Anyway, I assume you’re wearing underwear!”

Oh, good _grief_. Romani lets out a strangled noise, one that sounds more like assent than offence, and in the end he lets his hands drop and tries to lever himself up so she can be the one to take off the pants. He has about enough energy to lift his hips and that’s it, at this point.

He _is_ , in fact, wearing underwear, and it turns out he does not have the energy to care about covering up while Da Vinci goes to throw the scrub bottoms into the hamper and rifle through his wardrobe. “Hm. I don’t remember you having anything else appropriate. Wait a few moments and I’ll go get something from the infirmary, it’s closer.”

“Mm.”

The door hisses open and then shut again, and Romani lets his eyes close, and breathes. It helps, a little. This smell isn’t Ritsuka’s room. Ritsuka’s room had been unoccupied, and new; sterile and clean, a blank slate and the last bastion of a hiding-place for his jangling nerves. He’d known — he’d _known_ , not in rainbow shades, but he’d known.

He’d always ‘known’. Half his reputation for loafing is because he’d hidden, every time something went down in the command-room. He’d known it would happen like that, in that place; he’d known and made himself a slacker, so no one would think he was hiding from a tragedy he knew would be arriving, so he could at least — do something _after_ the fact.

He sure hadn’t been able to do anything _before_ the fact.

This isn’t that room. This room is his. It’s always been his. It smells like mandarins and whatever perfume Da Vinci was wearing, and — something else. Something …

Rose?

Romani opens his eyes and rolls toward the bureau to look at the rose — it’s gone. But he can smell it.

It takes some looking before he finds it on his desk instead, still sitting in water. Had he changed the water? He doesn’t think he’d changed the water. He’s pretty sure he’d had to refill it, though, and that counts, right?

Right.

The rose. For such a small thing, and it’s only one rose, its scent seems to cut through everything else — straight through the acridity of fear and panic and sweat that still lingers. The mandarins help with that, but the rose seems to be pulling more than its weight. Romani’s pretty good with scents.

What _is_ it, about that rose?

Romani scowls. He bets Merlin is using it to spy on him. “You’re just being obnoxious now, aren’t you?”

He rolls over pointedly so his back is to the rose, and closes his eyes to pretend it’s not there, because he is an adult, goddamn it, and a very tired one, at that.

* * *

When Da Vinci returns Romani is half-dozing, and he stirs himself with a groggy jolt. Actively falling asleep just isn’t happening, apparently; even with citrus and rose cutting through the smells of pain and panic, there's too many things looming in this room for him to feel comfortable in it.

... It might have helped if he hid the rose, or something, just in case Merlin really is watching.

“Still awake, Romani?” asks Da Vinci, cheerful but hushed, and Romani pushes himself upright, still groggy and rubbing his eyes, and trying to shake hair off his shoulders — vainly. “Oh, good. It would have been annoying to get pants on you if you’d been asleep.”

She throws a set of pants in his lap, and it’s only then, when Romani opens his eyes and actually looks, that he realises she isn’t alone. David looks back with a kind of quiet, badly-hidden amusement, and Romani’s cheeks warm. He doesn’t squawk or anything like that; the impulse is dulled before it gets far enough to react. But he unconsciously drags the pants closer to cover everything.

“Oh, just pretend I’m not here,” says David, in very nearly the same tone as Da Vinci, as he goes to the same corner he’d used the night before. Romani had been halfway convinced that had been a dream, honestly. “Hmm. Ms Da Vinci, do you think you’ll need the desk chair?”

“Oh, I’ll definitely need the desk chair,” says Da Vinci promptly, and hefts her go-bag of tools, bits and bobs. Romani watches in blank incomprehension as she moves around his bed to his desk, and plonks her things down as if she just belongs here, now.

David sighs. “Ah, a king sitting on the hard floor … this place is a sore trial.”

Nevertheless, he folds up his legs to be kneeling, back into the corner, and spinning his kinnor out of his staff. It still has a ragged edge, Romani sees dimly.

“Kings are thick upon the ground these days,” Da Vinci shoots back without even looking up. “The lot of you are like weeds — you’ve even taken over our chief medical officer. Romani, are you going to put those pants on, or just sit around in your underwear? Rude.”

This time a quiet strangled noise does emerge, and Romani finally manages to move, to uncurl himself and shuffle to the edge of the bed furthest from them both in order to dress. In as far as it counts as dressing, when he’s in scrubs. Having to navigate around the waves and waves and _waves_ of his hair isn’t something he missed, he finds — with all the crying he’s been doing, his hair is both staticky and humid, and it takes a while just to make sure it’s still free by the end.

By that point David is humming in the corner, and the light notes of the kinnor are in the air, brushing away the sounds of sirens Romani hadn’t quite realised were lingering in his ears. Over by the desk, Da Vinci hums something and sets something heavy by the edge. When Romani turns, he finds she’d put the rose closer to him.

He scowls at it, and Da Vinci catches the look, tipping her head at him in quizzical amusement. “That’s an awfully black look for a pretty flower, Romani. What did the rose ever do to you?”

“It’s _Merlin’s,_ ” Romani says, and goes to crawl back into bed. He’s not so oblivious as to miss the glance Da Vinci throws David, but it’s really too much effort to wonder why.

“Well, it’s smells much better than you do right now, so you’ll just have deal with it,” says Da Vinci, a little brisk as she returns to her unpacking. Romani thuds his head down, and his bed is high enough that he can see, a little, across the long surface of the desk. He can see the tools she removes, and the baubles; the mechanical bird she lays down gently in its disparate pieces. It isn’t the crow. Maybe she finished the crow.

Soft voice and gentle notes steal away his awareness, piece by piece, and Romani falls asleep on Da Vinci humming along, not quite in tune, as she bends over his desk.


	8. I can mend a broken heart

When Romani wakes up again it’s with the deliciously blank warmth of no dreams and a lot of rest, and actually spends a few minutes wondering what’s wrong before realising — nothing. Nothing is wrong. He hadn’t dreamed and he didn’t toss and turn; he actually slept well. It feels weird.

He isn’t alone this time, too, and that’s more of a relief than he knows what to do with. From his desk there’s still the clink of soft metals, of a screwdriver and gears; and every so often Da Vinci making a sound of satisfaction or a verbal moue. There’s something missing in Romani’s ears, though, and it takes him some time to realise it’s because David’s no longer playing — either he’s gone or he stopped when Romani was asleep.

Or maybe not. He’s really not sure he would have slept so well, without that alleviation.

Maybe he’s just gone, after a while. Romani feels guilty that he’s glad about that. There’s something — alarming about David right now, something Romani is pretty sure is related to the whole … everything … and Romani having to look at it, and reconcile it. Reconciling it seems very big, currently, especially with everything else jostling for attention ahead of it.

He doesn’t want to think about it.

He opens his eyes to slits to watch Da Vinci’s silhouette work in the light of his desk-lamp, her hair a pinned-back cascade. It’s not something she does except when she’s working — not a tail or a braid, but a simple clip to gather the hair which would get in her way, otherwise.

… Isn’t that the one Romani had given her on her first year at Chaldea? That had been _awkward_ — and she’d been cheerfully judgemental. He hadn’t thought she kept the thing …

Romani’s pretty sure he doesn’t make a sound, but Da Vinci looks up, sees him and smiles that small mischievous smile which belongs on the Mona Lisa’s face. “Oh, you’re awake. Sleep better this time?”

It takes a moment for Romani to find his voice, and when he does it’s soft. “… Yeah.”

He’s not altogether sure he wants to sit up and acknowledge the room, though. Last night feels like — some distant nightmare, only present if he faces it and acknowledges it actually happened. He’s really bad at doing that, it transpires.

“Want to sit up and give me a hand, then?” Her cheer is no less obnoxious for Romani’s being wrung out like an old dishrag. But — it’s something to do, so he stirs after a moment, swinging his legs over the side of his bed and scooting forward so he can reach the desk. “Hold this.” She hands him a piece of … something he can’t identify. “Give it to me in a minute.”

Romani eyeballs his desk. It looks like an engineer’s wet dream. “You could have just put it down, you know.”

“It would have gotten lost,” she answers promptly.

“I’m getting the feeling it was just a pretence to get me out of bed, actually.”

“Why, Romani.” She glances his way again, eyes all wide and innocent. “Would I do that?”

He’s smiling without his consent, he knows. He’s not sure when that happened. But when she holds out her hand, he puts the piece into it; and from there it seems easier to look around the room.

It looks mostly like it did last night, but a little brighter for morning lights, the fake kind of sunlight Chaldea uses to help regulate its residents’ circadian rhythms. David is gone from the corner, like Romani thought, and his stomach can really stop doing that flipping thing any day now.

“Did I dream David being here?” he asks, just to be sure, and not knowing whether he wants the answer to be yes or no.

“Nope,” says Da Vinci cheerfully. “After all those stories about his music soothing the previous king, I thought it might be helpful to you.”

It was. Romani’s not sure he wants to say that. He looks around again, a slow drag of a gaze, and realises belatedly what’s missing — the rose is gone from the desk.

… He almost asks. Almost. Doesn’t, at the last minute. He really doesn’t need Merlin being a voyeur, honestly, and if Da Vinci thinks it’s safe to put somewhere else, well, now Romani knows that it won’t hurt him to put some distance between.

He gets up in a rustle of hair, sighs as it catches on the edges of the desk, and winds up carrying it in his arms as he moves around the room. “It seems different.”

It’s not the looks. It’s the air, the ambiance. He’s pretty sure just the lights don’t have this much impact … but then again he stopped paying attention to them a lot time ago.

“We put up some reeds,” says Da Vinci, and extends one arm to point without looking up. After a moment Romani spots the jars of oil, with the reeds in them; he exhales deeply.

… Oh.

Frankincense. 

“That’s unfair,” he grumbles, but he can’t deny he feels better for it. It’s — comforting. Like going home, after a very long time.

He’s at least expecting the dull pang in his heart, this time.

“Mm. Maybe. Romani.” The sounds by the desk stop, and Romani turns to find Da Vinci’s put down her tools and twisted in the chair to face him, leaning one elbow on the back of it. She studies him for a moment, and Romani honestly has no idea what she’s seeing, what’s she’s thinking — but after a moment she sighs, and Romani’s heart skips a beat.

“What?”

She flaps a hand at him. “Ah, it’s nothing … well, nothing dire. Just a little more pressing than I’d hoped.”

His heart flips again. “The Mage’s Association?”

“Sort-of,” she says, and shrugs. “Remember how, when the Grand Order began, we only had a staff of a couple dozen people?”

“Yes,” says Romani cautiously, because there’s a punch-line here, he knows it; he just can’t see it.

“Remember how most of the staff evacuated because of the explosion?”

— Oh. _Oh_. Romani’s heart freezes and balloons at once, and two different noises try to come out of him, so he winds up coughing instead. “Um — actually, I’d kind of forgotten …”

Not everyone had died. Well, they had, sort-of — the whole of humanity had been incinerated. But the individuals, the _people_ , his wards, his staff …

The balloon is winning.

“Yes, so did we,” Da Vinci admits. “Anyway, not all of them are here right now. After the Grand Order ended, some of them were recalled, some took a voluntary redundancy — there were a few different things. Some were just put on hold when the Mage’s Association decided to audit us. But … well, we have a lot more staff than we did before.”

At first Romani stares at her blankly, his brain ticking over and not quite seeing her point. He shakes his head. “Leonardo, I don’t —”

“I sent as many of them as I could on a supply run to Hobart when we found your Singularity,” she says, and Romani freezes again. “To be perfectly honest, some of them are probably reporting to the Association, and I just didn’t want to have to explain every little thing that was going to happen.”

“So you just — manufactured a —?”

“Well, we were due,” Da Vinci admits. “I just may have … planned it a little more than usual, that’s all.”

This still isn’t — it’s not making sense, and everything Romani can’t see is starting to feel like a heavy fog in his chest. He leans against the wall, thinks twice about sinking to the floor, and does it anyway, wrapped in the blanket of his hair. “I still don’t — why are you telling me this?”

Supply runs take a week, or more, depending on what they need. It’s usually a coveted opportunity to leave Chaldea for a bit, stretch their legs, as it were; to send as many as Da Vinci sounds like she had would have been unusual, but not unprecedented. Maybe they wouldn’t be gone as long, if Chaldea’s too strapped for money to refill the emergency surplus they’d had to use up, but —

“They radioed in last night,” says Da Vinci soberly. “They’ve had to turn back before reaching the port — sudden storms on the coast. They’ll be arriving later today.”

… Oh. Romani’s chest constricts this time, until he feels sick with it, and he puts his head against the wall and exhales slowly to try and make it open up a little.

“I’d planned on telling you a bit later,” she adds. “I didn’t want it to be a total surprise; just give you more of a chance to adjust to being here. And give us some time to figure out what you wanted to tell them. They don’t know you’re alive, Romani.”

And even if they did, he doesn’t look the same. Not at all. Even after cutting his hair, making him look more like he was — he doesn’t look the same. Romani exhales again, and this time is surprised to find tears on his cheeks.

“I don’t know,” he says steadily, and it doesn’t seem like a burden it might have, once. It feels like it _should_ be one — like there’s a hole where the burden _was_ — but it isn’t. “I don’t … Don’t hide things, I guess.” He hadn’t when things went bad, why should he start now? “If I’m not hiding from the Mage’s Association anyway, then … it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“Not a whole lot,” Da Vinci agrees. “Honestly, I think it’s for the best — accounting for timing, of course. We’ll need to be careful. Still, it’s better than trying to keep _this_ secret frm everyone. I was a little worried last night, you know.”

Romani laughs, a little scattered. “Worried? What for?”

“Well, just imagine if you’d gone running around the halls when the others come back. It would have been a lot more awkward to explain.”

“And all the Servants hanging around the corridors _aren’t_?” 

“Oh, no,” says Da Vinci cheerfully, “most of the time, I let them explain _themselves_. Anyway, before we realised some of the demon-god pillars had escaped, we had enough staff to start thinking about things like re-opening the Academy —”

The _Academy_. Romani’s heart skips a beat again. It had been one of Malisbury’s visions — not one of the major ones, but one of them. Olga had taken it and run with it, determined to pace her father, to make Chaldea something more of what he’d envisioned; a cradle of knowledge and learning, for the sake of humanity.

“Obviously, we haven’t been able to, without the Association’s input,” Da Vinci continues, “but when _that’s_ all over I should expect that we’d have a lot to do on our hands. Most of the staff will make a return, for one thing … we’ll need a new director, for another …”

Leonardo Da Vinci, Romani realises with incredulous dawning comprehension, is _babbling_. Now the rainbow threads choose to make themselves heard: not in some dual-toned action seen and seen again, but the quiet undertones of uncertainty and fluster. 

“Leonardo —” Romani has to stop to try and get the laugh out of the word. “Leonardo … is there a question you want to ask in there, somewhere?”

She shoots him a vaguely put-out look. “Well, if you’re going to be like that about it …” She taps her fingers together, the gauntleted ones, in a rhythmic _snick snick snick_ of steel. “Well, yes, to be honest, I did. Romani — will you be okay rejoining Chaldea? Honestly, and this is difficult for me to acknowledge, but I _may_ be a tiny smidge out of my depth, being acting commander of Chaldea.”

A tiny smidge. Romani tries to muffle his laugh in his hair, this time, and for his troubles inhales some of it and winds up coughing. Ah, next time he just won’t hide it. “So that’s what you meant by ‘worried’, huh?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” she says with great dignity, turning back toward the desk to pretend she’s focused on her work. “Obviously, as your friend and colleague, I was concerned about your health and wellbeing, and nothing more.”

“And not at all the prospect of being left alone to carry Chaldea?” Romani’s smile is a little painful, but mostly it’s full and warm; and when Da Vinci glances sidelong at him, her smile is wry.

“Ah, I have to admit, it was easier being a genius when I didn’t have so much riding on me, you know?”

“Yes,” says Romani. “Yes, I do know.” He pushes himself to his feet and staggers for a moment before he can shake the very fleeting pins and needles out of his legs; but then he goes over to her, dropping his hair to wrap his arms around her shoulders and rest his chin on her head. It’s not something he’d done often — mostly to annoy her, mostly when he was seeing something she was feeling and wanted to pretend didn’t exist, so he didn’t have to call her out on it and could still offer her some measure of comfort. “I want to be here,” he says, and his throat closes suddenly, his eyes blurring. “I want to be here, in Chaldea, working for humanity’s future.”

“Good,” says Da Vinci, quiet instead of cheerful, and maybe it’s lucky his mirror’s on the other side of the room, and not on this wall. This would be a lot harder if they had to look at each other having emotions. She reaches up to squeeze his arm with her ungauntleted hand. “In case it wasn’t obvious, we want you here too, Romani.”

That isn’t helping with the lump in his throat; but his chest is warm and full, and these tears feel a lot better than the ones from last night.

“Now,” Da Vinci continues, reaching for her equipment on the desk, “before you start crying into my hair, it’s about mid-morning, the girls are a shambles, and Vlad has delivered some things for you to wear. Why don’t you go shower and get changed and we’ll see about getting that mane of yours into some semblance of order before we take you around to a few more places?”

Romani laughs and it’s soft and watery; but he pulls back to turn, brushing hair out of his path with his arm. “They aren’t really inappropriate, I hope …”

“They’re not too kingly, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m fairly sure that would have caused more trouble than it’s worth, and Vlad is unexpectedly diplomatic, for a Berserker.”

“Well, when you can seduce as many people as he did into his castle …”

“Exactly.”

Da Vinci continues tinkering behind him as Romani goes to his wardrobe to find the things in it that are new. It isn’t anything like he had feared, and that’s a relief: as Da Vinci promised, there’s nothing overtly royal in the mix. Mostly they seem to be shirts and slacks, and if they lean a bit ancient, it’s hard to tell whether that’s because Vlad was attempting something that suited an ancient Jew, or simply airing an opinion on the styles of modern shirts.

In short order Romani has selected something basic enough, however odd it’s going to feel not being in uniform, and retreated to the bathroom. This has not changed, he thinks — until he opens the cupboard and discovers his aftershave is different.

It takes him a good five minutes of puzzling, even while showering, to realise it’s myrrh.

After that it’s probably a good thing he’s under water, because it means he can rinse the tears and pretend they’re not there. So unfair …

Well. He’d prefer to remember who he was with scents than with looks, he thinks. Maybe it suits.

Finally Romani emerges from the bathroom, hair a little damp where he couldn’t keep it out of the water, but himself finally clean and refreshed and dressed — save where he’s tugging hair out of his collar. “Okay.”

Da Vinci’s chair swivels and she gives him a critical up-and-down as he presents himself to her, a little awkward. He’s still bare-foot: his shoes will need more attention than just the one day. But he honestly doesn’t mind the coolness of the tiles all that much, and he eyeballs the kotatsu blanket, imagining it soft underfoot. One of the things he _had_ missed was the freedom to walk around barefoot … some days the constraints of modern fashion sensibilities, especially from jolly old England, had seemed more like a prison than a freedom.

“Better,” Da Vinci decides, “if only because they fit you now. Vlad seems to be making a point with that shirt, though.”

Romani tugs on the sleeves. “It’s not so bad,” he says defensively. 

It’s bigger than his dress shirts had been; more like a linen tunic, with loose sleeves. Romani suspects it might have been traded for something that had actually been his. He’s used to wide sleeves, anyway … it just makes them a bit hard to roll up.

They hide his arms and the tattoos on them very, very well. Maybe they’ll even pair well with gloves …

“You aren’t a pirate,” Da Vinci says judgingly, and eyes him a bit more. “I suppose those slacks will do for now.”

“You’re dressing me in your head right now, aren’t you?”

“Mhm. It isn’t often I’ve had an opportunity to delve into the realms of fashion, you know. It’d be fun to create a good friend a new wardrobe.”

“Do I get any say in this?” he grumbles.

“Your only say was ‘I like the coat’,” Da Vinci says severely but with a flash of a smile as she swivels on the chair back to her equipment. “I suppose I can see what I can do about making the uniform fit you.”

“There _is_ a reason it’s a uniform, you know. Even Malisbury wore one.”

“Ah, you have designs on Malisbury’s wardrobe, then?” She grins over her shoulder as he splutters, and that’s when the doorbell goes. Romani shoots her a suspicious look she only returns with a bright smile, and goes to press the intercom.

“Um. Hello?”

“Doctor!” Ritsuka’s shout is so loud the panel statics and she’s audible even through the door, and Romani winces. “You’re awake! We heard something bad happened last night and —”

“Senpai!” Mash interrupts. “How about we come inside first?”

“Oh, yeah … uh, we’ve got food?”

Romani keys the door open to see Ritsuka lifting a tray of food up at the intercom as if he can see it, and they spend a notable second blinking at each other.

“Would you like to come in?” Romani tries, because it’s the only thing that comes out of his mouth and, honestly, that’s probably socially acceptable?

Ritsuka’s face lights up. “Yes please! Move.” She barges forward hardly without giving time for Romani to ‘move’. “So we heard about last night and I feel like maybe we shouldn’t have left you alone overnight? So sorry about that and I guess Da Vinci fixed it — hi, Da Vinci —”

“Good morning, Ritsuka, your engine is running hot,” says Da Vinci cheerfully.

“I was _worried_ ,” Ritsuka protests, putting the tray carefully down on the kotatsu. “Okay, here’s the doctor’s breakfast. You didn’t call us just to deliver _breakfast_ , right? Right?”

She looks between them, hands on hips, and Mash giggles and offers Romani a very small but genuine smile. “Senpai’s been babbling all night.”

“I do not babble,” Ritsuka complains. “C’mon, give me stuff to do! I’m going stir-crazy!”

“You _just_ came back from a Singularity,” Romani says incredulously.

“Yeah, and I’m bored and restless. So?”

Romani looks at her for a moment, torn between flabbergast and worry; and in the end he turns toward Da Vinci, frowning. “Exactly what have you been doing with my girls while I’ve been gone?”

“Don’t blame me for the demon-god pillars,” Da Vinci says at once, and adds almost before Romani can wince, “and I’m not blaming you for it either, for the record. Just out of spite.”

“… Spite for whom?”

“Spite for the urge that tells me I should,” Da Vinci informs him primly, rifling around in her bag. “There’s a fair few of us who are pretty unhappy with having our feelings co-opted without our realisation, for the record. When the trade-off is between humanity going without magic versus the risk of something we managed to solve quite well, frankly I think resentment is a bit overblown. Aha!”

Before Romani can figure out what his emotions are doing, or indeed an answer to the things Da Vinci is so cavalierly throwing aside, she pulls out a set of brushes and combs, looking very pleased with herself.

“Now, I’m not quite done yet with a chair for the spa, but it’s fairly obvious by now that you can’t keep going around with your hair untended like that. So, Ritsuka, your mission this morning is to braid Romani’s hair.”

Ritsuka actually lets out a squeal of delight, almost tripping over the end of Romani’s bed in her rush to collect the brush-set. “ _Great_. I’ve been wanting to do this for _days_.”

“And anyway, Romani,” Da Vinci adds, turning back to him with her brow pulled down in a fashion which cannot help but be vaguely mocking, “is it any wonder that Ritsuka is on an emotional high right now? That’s not _my_ fault. As far as we’re concerned, the aftermath to several Singularities is still ongoing.”

He really doesn’t stand a chance, does he? Romani lifts his hands in surrender, laughing softly with tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat. Mash takes his hand and nudges him with her shoulder. “Please sit down, Doctor. You can eat while Senpai and I figure out what to do with your hair.”

She, also, sounds pretty pleased about this. Romani vaguely remembers when she was younger, letting her play with his hair … ah, that hadn’t lasted long, had it? He wipes away tears and his smile doesn’t budge.

“Oh, if you’re all going to gang up on me like this … fine, fine.”

He’ll probably be able to manage eating with this lump in his throat. Probably. It might even help. He follows Mash’s direction, fitting his long legs under the kotatsu blanket. His foot nudges something warm and furry, a little more forcefully than strictly wise, and a muffled yowl comes out from under the blanket.

“Oh, that’s where Fou’s been,” Mash exclaims, lifting the blanket to reach under and beckon.

Romani winces. “How long has he been under there?”

“I’m quite sure I don’t know,” Da Vinci says primly, in a fashion which makes Romani suspect the answer is ‘all night’, or at least part of it; and then Da Vinci adds, “he was in your hair for a good few hours while you were sleeping, you know.”

“Why didn’t he come out and say hello, then?” Romani grumbles as Mash withdraws the irascible fluff-ball out from under the kotatsu, Fou’s tail swishing and eyes trained on Romani. “Don’t look at me like that! How was I meant to know?”

“He’s got something in his tail,” says Mash, but it swishes away from her hand when she reaches for it. “Doctor, could you —?”

“Oh, fine. As long as he doesn’t punish me for kicking him _accidentally_.” Romani catches the swishing tail and feels something dull-thorny under fur, and suspicion blooms in his mind as he sorts through what’s fur and what isn’t. Sure enough, the rose appears as he brushes fur aside, and Romani closes his eyes and shakes his head, trying not to feel the way his heart leaps.

“Oh, that’s where that went,” says Da Vinci cheerfully. “I thought I’d just knocked it off the desk by accident when I made a breakthrough. You didn’t even stir, Romani.”

“Just hand me some scissors,” Romani says with a sigh, and immediately Fou’s tail jerks with a violent swish.

“ _Fou!_ ”

“I’m not going to cut it all off,” Romani reassures him, “just fix what’s gotten matted around the rose, that’s all. I’ll be careful, I promise.”

“… kyuuuu …”

That sounds pretty sulky grudging, but it sounds enough like assent that Romani holds out his hand for Da Vinci’s pair of smallest scissors, and bends his head over Fou’s tail. He is, as promised, gentle: but when he’s cut away matted fur enough to uncover the rose, its stem quivers under his fingers, loosens from around Fou’s tail and curls neatly around Romani’s wrist exactly over the marks it had left the first time.

“Hey!” Romani squawks, but the thorns are gentle: he can feel them against his wrist, but they don’t penetrate skin. It also doesn’t budge when he drops the scissors to yank on the rose’s stem. “ _Seriously_?!”

It hadn’t done this _before_!

The girls are giggling, and giggle more for the wounded look Romani sends them both.

“It seems to like you?” Ritsuka tries, picking up the scissors and tapping Mash’s arm with the handle. “Here, Mash, let me finish off Fou’s tail. He can’t go around with his fur all mussed like that.”

“I don’t _want_ it to like me!” Romani whines, yanking on the rose. Its stem coils more tightly around his wrist. He’d even go so far as calling it _obstinate_ , its petals curling in stubbornly as a half-closed bloom when it definitely hadn’t been one before. At least its thorns are dulled. “Why is it doing this, anyway? Hasn’t it done enough already?”

Mash throws Da Vinci a wide-eyed look behind her fringe she probably thinks is more subtle than it is. Ritsuka seems determined not to look at him, focussing on Fou’s tail.

“Ah, Romani,” Da Vinci sighs.

“What?”

“You realise that rose is one of the reasons you’re alive, don’t you?”

“I know that!” Romani scowls down at the rose so he doesn’t have to see the weird faces the girls are making, or Da Vinci’s long-sufferingness. There’s something else to the expression, there, but Romani doesn’t know what it is. It might not be something he’s seen directed at him before. He also tries to ignore the wild pounding of his heart. “I wondered what you offered Merlin to con him into helping.”

Mash makes a quiet objecting noise and the subsides, and when Romani glances over her cheeks are pink and she’s carefully not looking at him. Oh, yes, he _definitely_ has the impression there’s something they’re not telling him, now. His heart pounds a little quicker, until he feels sick with it.

“What?” he asks again, and Da Vinci hums, her gauntlet hand drumming a staccato on the back of his desk chair.

“Oh, I’m just debating whether or not it’s a good idea to tell you this early. You’ve already got a lot to process, after all.”

— Tell him? _Process_? Good idea?

There’s definitely _something_ , and Romani means to talk, but the sudden spike of — anxiety, that’s all it is — makes the words tangle in his throat so he coughs instead. “I remember —”

Crap. Crap crap crap this isn’t something he wanted to look at yet, this isn’t something he wanted to think about —

He coughs again, and sorts through his words, and manages to push out more tremulously than he wants: “I remember who — Magi*Mari was — if that’s what you mean.”

He doesn’t look at them. He doesn’t look at anyone, but casts his gaze around the room, avoiding their eyes and looking at the rose; avoiding anything which means he might have to actually _face_ that revelation and _reconcile_ it. The knowledge sits like a pit in his chest, even while his stomach feels like it’s rising.

“Ah, maybe not yet,” Da Vinci says after a moment. “When are you going to look at that, by the way, Romani?”

“Um …”

‘Never’ probably isn’t an answer she’s going to accept, is it?

“Not yet?” he tries, sliding his gaze sideways to try and ascertain what Da Vinci’s face is doing. Mostly, it’s looking torn between understanding sympathy and dissatisfaction. Her fingers drum again.

“Give me a timeframe,” she says.

“I don’t —”

Why is this important? What’s going on? Panic is a sudden flutter in his chest. Does he even want to know?

Actually, no, he doesn’t. He’s really tired of knowing things and he would _really like to not know, please and thank you_.

“Do I have to?” he asks feebly.

“Yes,” says Da Vinci, and her tone is uncompromising. He must have looked miserable, because her expression softens. “You don’t have to know _everything_ , Romani, I promise. But this — yes, I think this is something you need to look at. It’s important.”

Damn it.

Romani looks up at the ceiling, twiddles his thumbs and tugs uselessly on the rose’s stem, and tries not to hem and haw actually out loud. A timeframe. She wants him to put a schedule on figuring out his emotions in relation to this stupid rose. That’s really, super unfair.

The staff are coming back later today. That’s something he’s going to have to deal with, so definitely not today. He’d like to guarantee he won’t start sobbing grossly in front of anyone. And the whole — Lev thing. And Olga. When he thinks about those his chest squeezes so tightly there isn’t room for anything else. That’s going to take a long time; and now it’s started there’s no way he can stop it. That initial outpouring of pain doesn’t mean it’s gone away, just that it’s going to ebb and flow a lot.

And then, of course, there’s the whole thing with the Mage’s Association, and trying to figure out where he fits in now, and dealing with the remaining demon-god pillars …

The thought of everything he’s going to have to face makes the flutter of panic turn feeling sick into full-blown nausea. Romani swallows hard. “Can you ask me again when you cut my hair?”

It’s not an answer. Not really. It’s just putting off having to make a real decision. But Da Vinci examines him for a minute, and then finally nods. “Okay.”

The wave of relief is so intense it makes Romani slump, and leaves him feeling weak in all his limbs. He exhales. “Okay. I — Thank you. Okay. Um. I may need to eat something.”

Possibly. Probably. The nausea is already ebbing away, his optimised magical circuits resolving anything that isn’t his body functioning at its best. Honestly, it’s a wonder he never starved to death in his reborn body, he’d been so used to not having to worry about that sort of thing.

Those are things he is not going to mention to the women, he decides in a fit of belligerent spite. Nope. It’ll just make them worry more.

“Yes, eat.” Da Vinci points at the tray just about in front of him.

“And meanwhile, we get to play with your hair,” says Ritsuka cheerfully, as if she had not just spent the last five minutes being alarmingly, tellingly quiet. Romani pulls a smile onto his face, and it’s genuine enough, despite that he needs to expend some effort to get it there.

“And meanwhile, you get to play with my hair. You’ve been waiting for this moment, haven’t you?”

“I _so_ have. There you go, Fou.” Ritsuka pats Fou between the ears and Fou yawns hugely, hops down from Mash’s arms, and wiggles under the kotatsu blanket to make himself at home on Romani’s lap.

Mash giggles. “See, Doctor? Fou did miss you too.”

“Fou is a capricious little beast with possessive tendencies,” Romani mutters, but the smile sits a little better on his face, and when he reaches down with the non-rosed hand, Fou lets him stroke him. Honestly, he hadn’t expected Fou to be waiting for him, that first night … he hadn’t noticed his absence, the second. But the warm purring weight on his lap — yes. Romani had missed having animals around. Fou rejecting him so thoroughly the first time they’d met had been more painful than Romani cared to admit.

“Okay!” says Ritsuka in a voice full of glee. “So, Mash, I really do think a braid is the best course —”

“Oh, Senpai, you like braids in everything.”

“Yeah, but c’mon, with this much hair it really _needs_ to be contained.”

“I guess that makes sense, at least for now …”

Romani lets their chatter wash over him as he picks up his cutlery, and Da Vinci catches his eye just enough to look smugly at him as she turns back to the detritus on his desk.


	9. If you need to crash, then crash and burn

In the end, Ritsuka wins on the braids front: it’s simply that much more practical, with how much hair Romani has. It takes a while for them to decide on style, because even braids alone offer a wide range of possibilities; and of everything, it’s honestly the brushing that takes the most time. They wind up separating his hair into three sections and each taking one, obliging Da Vinci to abandon her tinkering.

He’d had some help, in the Singularity, to at least manage it before it became too much; but not so much near the end, and not in the last couple of days. There’s a few snares which need attending, and that frankly takes up the rest of the morning into lunch-time. In Romani’s room. Again.

Honestly he’s getting a little sick of his room, at this point. It’s comforting, but it’s — small. It seems to be shoving in his face everything that he was, and by extension everything that he is no longer.

He’s never been good with small spaces like this, honestly … it’s not like he’s claustrophobic but he chafes at having just a single room, if it means he has to be here for hours on end. The rose doesn’t help. It reminds him the cost of imprisonment, even the purely physical sort, even when Romani manages to sidle around the thought of Merlin himself.

That, and Holmes’s voice keeps echoing in his head, all obnoxious and unfair. _“Never forget that this, too, is a choice.”_

He could stay in here for the afternoon, pretend that the returning staff aren’t there: but that’s something else which just puts off the choice, and doesn’t make it go away. He’s got a lot of experience in that.

So, when the girls are finally done and Romani’s hair is a mass of braids pinned up and woven together, and Da Vinci has to leave to attend to matters in the command-room, Romani dares to leave his room — alone.

The infirmary is his target, Romani’s already decided; it’s a place he’s been a million times, both before and after the incineration. It’s a familiar route. Its hard emotional edges have mostly been worn off — he hopes. The number of times he’s had to move through these halls, he ought to be used to doing it without Lev or Olga …

It still feels surreal, stepping out into the hall, not having the girls or Da Vinci at hand. Like he’s unmooring himself from a dock he didn’t know he was tethered to until the door closes behind him, and Romani has to take some deep breaths to still the flutter in his chest. His hand feels oddly naked, for lack of gloves or rose, finally convinced to be returned to its glass of water.

Nothing happens. The hall is just a hall, his door is just a door; the world has not split, for all that it seems like it should have. Funny, how being the one who changes makes him feel like the entirely world should have changed with him.

He’s not sure if that’s unique to him or a common human experience. Maybe he’ll ask. He’d like it if it’s not just him.

The trip to the infirmary feels surreal; familiar but not, and the changes make the unfamiliarity more acute still. He’s not the only one in the halls: he passes several people, not all of them Servants. The staff’s reactions are mostly just a nod of acknowledgement, if they seem to realise who he is at all. Maybe they just think he’s another random Heroic Spirit … that would figure. None of the humans he passes are those who — who were in Chaldea during the Grand Order.

It’s a bit of a relief, actually. The first time he rounded the corner and almost ran into someone, he’d frozen up, expecting — he doesn’t know what. Confusion, condemnation, a demand to show the badge Romani hadn’t yet recovered.

Instead there was — nothing. As far as meeting new-old staff went, it was anti-climatic, and bolstered him a little for the thought that when the bulk of the staff returns, maybe he can just not … do anything. And let them sort out their reactions themselves.

The Servants’ reactions, on the other hand, vary: they range from wariness to some degree of curious warmth to, at the furthest extreme, respect. The wariness Romani can understand, is the far more frequent of the three, and is easily handled with a smile pulled onto his face while pretending that nothing at all has changed. The second can be handled just the same.

And then there’s Georgios.

Georgios steps out of a door as Romani is passing by, and there is a moment when recognition is delayed and Romani’s already wearing the blank smile which has come alarmingly, relievingly easily to his face even after all this time.

Then Georgios sinks to his knee and Romani is all but forced to stop there in the hall.

“My king,” says Georgios, and there’s a vibrating warmth in his tone that _really_ makes Romani want to sink into the floor. It almost sounds like Georgios is choked up, which — oh boy.

“You don’t have to do that,” says Romani in a very strangled voice; and then he adds, a little desperately: “ _Please_ don’t do that.”

He really doesn’t want someone coming around the corner and seeing this, oh _no_. Had he done that for David? Romani can’t remember. He’d avoided David. A little frantically he glances around, just to make sure no one else _is_ watching. Georgios, notably, _does not make a move to stop doing that._

“My king deserves all due respect and honour,” he says into the floor instead, and honestly, that really isn’t helping. In the end Romani bends to take him by the shoulders and make him rise, because, seriously, this is really awkward and just — no.

“Georgios, please. You don’t have to bow to me.” Even standing upright, Georgios keeps his head lowered, and Romani can feel his cheeks warm. “Seriously. I mean it.”

“… I don’t know that I can not,” Georgios murmurs at last, and Romani pats Georgios’s shoulders awkwardly.

“Well, you — you’ve done it already this time, I guess, so that’s, um — thank you?” He tries to imagine Georgios doing this _every single time_ they pass each other in the hall, and isn’t sure whether he manages to keep the horror off his face. “Please try and reconsider. _Please_.”

“I will consider whether I can stand the disrespect,” Georgios promises. Oh, brother.

“If you can’t,” Romani tries, “can you at least find it in yourself to look me in the face?”

It seems to take him an effort, but after a moment Georgios _does_ look up and actually look him in the eyes, and that’s almost worse, having to face the deep reverence that seems to be writ large on his face, in combination with the tears in his eyes and the grave stoicism in the rest of his expression.

“You honour me, my king, by giving me that leave,” says Georgios.

“It’s not an honour, I just —” Romani blows out a breath, and gives up. Really. Honestly. He’s giving up. “I don’t want to be put on a pedestal, you know? I’m still — I’m still who I was when I was a doctor. Really. It’s just that now you … know. That I was someone else. Before that.”

Oh, this is pathetic. Georgios looks at him keenly, examiningly, and honestly, Romani feels like he’s being peeled apart; and that’s almost worse than the reverence. There are so many people in Chaldea from customs and traditions that venerate his name for being a saint — the saint that _saints_ aspire to.

Romani doesn’t know how to handle that. He really doesn’t. He didn’t as Grand Caster, he hadn’t reborn; he knows how to handle it even less now that they _know_ that he is, when really he just feels like an imposter in a king’s body.

It’s funny, on some level, that he feels like Goetia actually was.

He doesn’t laugh.

“I don’t want to be venerated,” he says again, more quietly. “There’s a reason you all dismissed me, you know.”

“To our shame, my king,” answers Georgios, just as quietly. “To our lasting shame.” He bows then and stands aside to let Romani pass first, and as far as Romani can tell he doesn’t actually stop bowing until Romani’s out of sight.

Somehow, Romani hadn’t actually figured that meeting the Servants he’d known all this time would be more awkward than the staff who hadn’t even witnessed what he’d done in the intervening year-that-wasn’t. It’s frankly a relief to get to the infirmary, because it means there’s no more risk of running into someone suddenly — or less of one, anyway.

The infirmary is one of the few places in Chaldea which is always staffed — the command-room being the other. There might be others now that other areas of Chaldea have opened up, but Romani doesn’t know what they are, if so. It means that, no matter what, Romani can expect people in the infirmary — but he knows mostly who they’ll be.

He vaguely remembers seeing some of them the other night, when Ritsuka and Mash and Da Vinci had guided him dazed for a checkup.

Now when he enters, Emily is on desk duty and she looks up with a professional smile which fractures into an outright beam as he waves, a little self-consciously, with the tips of his fingers. There’s a moment when she opens her mouth and seems a little too overcome to actually say anything, and Romani feels the acute awkwardness of the situation; and then he’s thankfully rescued by Nightingale coming out of his office.

“Ah, you’re back for a checkup, Doctor,” she says briskly, as if there’s no doubt whatsoever.

“Um …” He really doesn’t remember whether he’d been told to come back or not. Everything between his waking up in the coffin and falling asleep in his bed is a daze.

“This way, this way.”

Nope, this is not a rescue. Nightingale walks off briskly and Romani shoots a ‘save me’ look at the giggling nurse before following as meekly as he knows how. Should he be asserting his authority, here? It’s not like this is his infirmary anymore … it’s also not like he was gone for all _that_ long!

Nightingale takes him into one of the exam rooms with the wealth of machines Romani had once joked did all his work for him. (Boy, had that been a jinx.)

“I don’t know how much you remember of the last time you were here —”

“Not all that much,” Romani admits. They would have had to take some scans to make sure he leyshifted properly, but if there’d been anything else, he really doesn’t remember.

“Then we’ll need to take them all again,” says Nightingale in tones of brisk inexorability. “You were stable enough when you came out, but your spiriton processes were still quite unsettled, so I deemed it better to get some rest first. You _have_ rested appropriately, Doctor?”

“Ye-eees,” Romani hedges, because — well. He’s rested. Quite a bit, actually. Just not always totally well.

“I heard the wolf howling,” says Nightingale implacably as she goes around powering up machines that need some time to initialise, and Romani winces.

“I thought only people who were in Shinjuku could hear him?”

“Not at all,” Nightingale says. “It’s unfortunate, but the injury that animal carries isn’t one I’m able to cure. I’ve offered to put it out of its misery, of course, but Master seems perturbed by the notion, and it didn’t seem particularly enamoured of the idea itself.”

“Yes, I can imagine that,” says Romani, a little more dryly than he intended.

“Then there’s no use in my attending to it when I hear the howl, is there?” She turns around to him, brisk and business-like and with dangerously sharp eyes. “I hear the howls of the despairing all the time, Doctor. Why _wouldn’t_ I hear those of the wolf as well?”

He looks at her for a moment, trying to catch his breath, trying to figure out if she’s saying she’d heard _him_ and whether he has a response against the prickle in his eyes and the awareness that the weight in his chest from that night had not _really_ subsided yet — only let itself be forgotten, or made lighter, by Da Vinci and the girls.

Nightingale pats the bed. “Up here, if you please, Doctor.”

Wordlessly Romani sits and swings his legs up, and lays down such as he can with the braids uncomfortable under his head. They hadn’t thought of this part.

“Hold still.” Nightingale’s voice comes more distant, past the field of the machine’s radius. Romani exhales and closes his eyes against the light overhead and the spherical hum around him. He hadn’t had cause to be in one of these machines much; once or twice, that he recalls, and the first of those is a blur of shock and trauma after his rebirth. The other had been on entrance to the academy — it’s not all that common for non-mages to learn magecraft, and for some ridiculous reason they’d felt the need to confirm his inferiority.

It had been a farcical bemusement, he remembers. Even Malisbury had looked embarrassed on behalf of his ignorant peers, in as much as Malisbury ever looked embarrassed about anything. Romani rather thinks he got to see that more than most people.

The machine powers down and Romani opens his eyes to find they’re wet, and tears have left trails down his temples.

“Please sit up while I process these scans, Doctor,” says Nightingale from the distance; and then she adds, “and do tell me where your pain is, this time. I still can’t help you if I don’t know where you’re hurt.”

Romani sits up and swings his legs back over, but stays seated on the bed, leaning on his hands so he can tip his head up and not have to actually look at her. “You always liked saying that.”

“I’m not blind, Doctor. Any idiot should have been able to tell your smile was a bandage. If I hadn’t had so many other patients more willing to be healed I would have been more forceful with you.”

“I’m thankful for your triage, Florence.” He actually is. He doesn’t know what he’d have done, how he’d have coped, if she’d made him confess his situation. It was bad enough as it was, but having to confront who and what he was in front of another Servant —

He’s not sure he’d have been able to maintain the barest amount of will he’d managed to find, in the end. Da Vinci had been difficult enough, and almost out of his hands; and he had known her for years. And _Gilgamesh_ … Romani would prefer not to think about that.

Nightingale hmphs without turning around. “Well, that’s what I’d like to say. The truth is that I knew you might have been the worst off, and I let myself prioritise other patients. I told myself there was no point in forcing a patient to be cured who didn’t want to be.”

“That didn’t stop you in America,” Romani says without thinking, and then his breath cuts off as realisation falls, and she turns with those piercing eyes.

“Precisely,” she says, and nothing else as she brings over the tablet loaded with the data. Romani sits where he is, swallowing hard against the rock in his throat. It’s becoming a familiar feeling.

She hadn’t pushed because she, like Da Vinci, like Mash’s heart, had been told by a quiet voice that he ought to be dismissed.

 _There’s a fair few of us who are unhappy,_ Da Vinci had said. Romani hadn’t stopped to wonder about whom. He should have known.

Nightingale raps his fingers with the stylus hard enough that Romani yelps and rubs his knuckles. “Pay attention, Doctor. This is, after all, your equipment. I’ve simply been safeguarding it for you.”

“I’m listening, I’m listening.”

The lump hasn’t gone but a smile has joined it, however small and watery. He really hopes he dries up soon; he’s going to start flood Chaldea, at this rate.

“It looks as though your spiriton flow has settled somewhat,” Nightingale says briskly, tabbing up to the results. “That, obviously, is a good sign. I had to consult a number of your books the other night to determine whether we ought to be more worried.”

“It’s a good sign,” Romani reassures her, and points to the scans. “See how it’s rhythmic here and here? Those are properly functioning chakra points.”

“Good,” says Nightingale. “I wasn’t sure. They’re very large. Your scans are almost totally different to the ones in your medical record.”

“Ah, yes …” Romani clears his throat. “Having magical circuits will change a lot of things.”

“They’re even more different to any of the other Casters we have on record,” Nightingale goes on briskly, and Romani winces.

“Ah, yes, about that …”

“I assume it’s because of those tattoos.” Nightingale points to his hand. “I wish to get a better look at them, but Commander Da Vinci seemed to think it wasn’t a good idea at the time. In light of the rest you so obvious needed, I conceded the point.”

Romani follows her point, and curls in his fingers with a grimace. Every now and then, he manages to forget … and then he looks at his hands again. Ah, he spent so long wearing gloves — not wearing them now feels like a freedom he hadn’t thought he’d get, at the same time he feels oddly naked.

“Ah, well …”

“Is there any reason they should _not_ be added to your medical record and be part of your physical examination, Doctor?”

They’re a thing, not an aesthetic.

They’re where demons lived.

They’re a symbol of everything he’d never had, that he’d given up just for these.

They’re what he used to give a great gift, squandered and used and forgotten, and which he even now cannot regret.

“No,” Romani says lamely, and even to himself he sounds as if he’d rather be anywhere else. Nightingale peers up at him with her craggiest, sternest look.

“Do I need some understanding of magic to be able to properly attend them?”

Romani blows out a breath, and there’s at least partly a laugh in it. “Yes. Paracelsus might be the better option, if I need to be examined.”

“I want to know the details,” says Nightingale. “We can’t always rely on Paracelsus. But certainly, I’ll see if he’s available, and you can teach us both.”

She sets down the tablet and moves toward the door, and Romani seizes that opportunity, and the tablet, to run quickly through his scans himself without having someone nearby to whom he’s going to have to either explain or pretend he’s not going to cry at. This machine is not precisely a standard piece of equipment found in any old hospital: part technology, part magic, entirely too useful and entirely too enlightening.

Romani could wish that Nightingale hadn’t thought to pull up his old medical file to put the scans side by side, though.

His physical scans are all fine — optimal, even, compared to what they’d been before, as a normal, non-magical human. (Optimal even compared to a magical human …)

His magical scans are a mess, not for being endangered in any way. They’re just — a mess. Romani’s seen a lot of mage scans before. Every now and then, he’d wondered what he might have looked like under them. Now he doesn’t have to wonder. He looks, frankly, _absurd_.

Footsteps lift his head, and Nightingale returns to the room with Paracelsus in tow, his sleeves rolled up and hair loosely braided back. He smiles when he sees Romani, that deceptively gentle smile, and bows.

“Ah, Your Majesty.”

“Not you too,” Romani says with a sigh. At least it isn’t a bow nearly as deep as Georgios’s — though if Romani has more than just him actively kneeling before him, Romani’s going to have words with … Someone.

“It’s difficult to forget,” says Paracelsus lightly, and closes the door behind him. “Florence says your magical circuits are anomalous?”

“Only when compared to other magical circuits.” Romani hands over the tablet, a little reluctantly, and Paracelsus’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Ah. Hm. I do see.”

Clairvoyance is a whisper of a thing, a warning — like a sixth sense just before Fou lands on Romani’s shoulders. He still doesn’t like the way it tricks his tongue into saying, “No.”

“Hm?”

“You were about to ask for some of my blood. The answer’s no.” Romani thinks that over, and then adds, a little more grudgingly, “It wouldn’t do you any good, anyway. The things that make me unique can’t be tracked by blood.”

“That’s a pity,” says Paracelsus, sounding genuinely wistful.

“The doctor has said that a Caster is required to ensure a complete and _thorough_ examination,” Nightingale informs him, and Romani winces at the emphasis.

“Ah, you don’t need to put it like that.”

“Don’t worry, Your Majesty.” Paracelsus smiles encouragingly, and Romani winces again. “I’m sure we can account for everything you may need. Would you care to take me through your magical circuits, please? I assume you’ve looked at the scans …” He pauses for long enough for Romani to nod. “Then I assume this seems fairly accurate to a healthy baseline?”

“It’s difficult to tell through scans alone,” Romani admits. “We didn’t exactly have them — um, back in Ancient Jerusalem.”

It feels … acutely surreal, talking about this out loud; acknowledging who he was, who he’d been, _from what era_. Part of him almost panics for the acknowledgement, wondering what Paracelsus _must_ be thinking, knowing Romani is someone he’d been compelled to ignore and yet, after all this, is still the man who had enabled magic to be borne by the masses …

Romani hopes the surreality wears off fast.

“You don’t feel ill, though?” asks Paracelsus keenly, reaching into his pocket for a stylus to make his own notes in Romani’s file. “No signs of anything untoward, compared to what you would have felt the last time you wore this body?”

That phrasing is simultaneously unnerving and relieving. Somehow, it makes it easier to approach the situation; it just — sounds creepy.

“No,” says Romani, honestly: he hasn’t spent a lot of time on his body, aside from how it looks. But then, grudgingly, he feels obliged to add: “I haven’t felt hungry.”

“Is that unusual?” Paracelsus shows Nightingale the tablet, even as he swipes for the scan of Romani’s spiriton processes. “Judging by this scan, the great surplus of spiritons in your capacity … I’d almost hypothesise you could subsist on them alone.”

“I can,” Romani admits in a very small voice, and even that brings Paracelsus up short, despite that he’d been halfway to saying it himself. Nightingale frowns and takes the tablet back, and Paracelsus lets her.

“Nonsense,” she says briskly. “Everyone needs nourishment and nutrition. Surely spiritons alone cannot provide that. They would need to be converted into different sorts of energy first.”

“It’s not just the spiritons,” Romani tries to explain, under Paracelsus’s far too attentive gaze. “I mean, yes, the spiritons drive it, but —” He stops and sighs. “Think of my magical circuits like a functioning limitless energy system. In an ordinary mage, there’s the _potential_ to create unlimited amounts of energy, but for whatever reason parts of the system are missing. In me, that’s not an issue.”

“The tattoos,” Paracelsus murmurs, and Romani nods reluctantly.

“When I was a child I still needed to eat and sleep, and so on — I tended to _forget_ to, but that’s a different matter.” That was usually a matter of being so overwhelmed by what he saw that he just … didn’t notice. He’d honestly thought that was a problem directly caused by the clairvoyance, up until he’d started studying medicine and came up for air after a study session to find himself ravenous. “After I designed the tattoos, it stopped being an issue. The reason an ordinary mage can’t just subsist on their own spiritons is that eventually they run out: given enough time, the energy pulled comes from their own body and they kill themselves trying — like starvation. Spiritons in a closed physiological process are usually a finite resource defined by their capacity. Even if a mage were able to pull additional spiritons from somewhere else, too much would overload their physical ability to process them and they would, in effect, drown.”

“But they aren’t like that for you,” says Paracelsus, and there is a hungry glint in his eye as he looks at Romani which is indescribably unnerving. “You’ve found a way to harness the spiritons and create new ones in the process of energy transference. You need not fear either starvation or drowning.”

“Something like that, yes.” He hadn’t been thinking about it in alchemical terms, but it makes sense that Paracelsus does. To be fair, Romani had never really thought about it at all — he’d been told what to do, and obeyed. It … really isn’t all that incredible a feat, when he thinks of it like that; of someone without the will to even develop the process.

He’s not sure Paracelsus would agree, given the look in his eyes.

“Then you are, in effect, creating your own spiritons,” says Nightingale, sounding deeply disapproving. 

“Yes,” Romani admits.

“From where?” Nightingale looks up from the tablet, her eyes sharp. “The energy in the universe is, I’ve heard, stable. Therefore, what you manufacture must come from somewhere else.”

Romani swallows, thinks of a ruined temple outside the flow of human history. “I’d really rather not talk about that.”

Paracelsus lets out a sigh of longing. “Ah, I suppose it isn’t immediately relevant, in any case … we may simply assume you create your own spiritons and move on from there. That would account for the movements shown in this scan.”

“How so?” Nightingale asks, presenting the tablet back to him, and he uses the stylus to sketch a quick ambient aura around the graphic of the human.

“Ordinarily, spiriton conversion happens just outside and around the body. This is what people call an _aura_ — it’s like the corona of a sun, but around a person. This is where internal and external spiritons collide, and where magic occurs. You may recall that when Master went to Camelot and Babylonia, the extreme intensity of the magic in the atmosphere was a danger to her, yes?”

“Yes,” says Nightingale briskly, with all her considerable attention on Paracelsus. Better him than Romani.

“This is because of a difference in pressures between the internal spiriton processes and the external ones,” says Paracelsus. “In the past, when magic was common, only those with special dispensation and training — heroes, kings, priests, demi-gods — had the physiology capable of meeting and matching the ambient spiritons. As magic became more common in human physiology, the ambient spiritons became less: a kind of balancing of the humours, as it were. Am I accurate so far, Your Majesty?”

Paracelsus looks sideways, a faint smile on his lips, and Romani hisses through his teeth with an apologetic smile.

“Ah, to be honest, I never thought about it in those terms before. But if you’re asking whether the reason the ambient magic faded after the Age of Gods is because I gave a lot of it to humanity — I suppose it’s not so inaccurate.”

Something in his ears is ringing. Is he imagining himself saying this? It feels altogether too dream-like. But Paracelsus merely nods, as if this is to be expected.

“There raises the question,” says Paracelsus, “whether magic faded because the gods had left, or the gods were obliged to leave due to the dearth of magic. But that is a question that doesn’t interest me — I’ll leave it to others to ponder.”

Nightingale not being one of them, it seems: her gaze is still on the tablet, her fingers at brisk tap against the scanning table, just a smidge too close to Romani’s leg to be genuinely comfortable, if Nightingale’s starting to get lively.

“So then,” says Nightingale, “instead of the spiriton conversion happening outside the doctor’s body, and spiritons being absorbed, they’re occurring within his body.”

“Yes, that seems to be about accurate,” Paracelsus agrees. “Of course, this process only occurs due to the presence of magical circuits. In a non-mage, spiritons move around the body and yet aren’t attracted to it. There’s no aura created, no interaction between — as you can see by the doctor’s original scans.”

Paracelsus pulls up one of Romani’s reborn scans, and indicates the lack of an ‘aura’ with a quick circle of his stylus. “The basic difference is that mages attract spiritons and non-mages don’t.”

“I see.” Nightingale nods. “Please continue, Paracelsus.”

“I’m beginning to feel superfluous,” Romani murmurs, but he’s smiling as he says it, and Paracelsus quick glance is made of small and compact enthusiasm. 

“Magical circuits are intrinsically linked to spiriton conversion,” he says obligingly to Nightingale. “One impacts the other — if there is something wrong with spiriton processing, there will be problems with the magical circuits, and vice versa. This is why Ms Kyrielight has been unable to use magic.”

It’s a good thing, Romani thinks silently, that he already knew about that, because neither of them stop to make sure he already did. It serves to wipe the smile off his face between effectively, though.

Paracelsus continues, oblivious: “And, of course, it means that a damaged magical circuit, depending on the damage, can be worse than simply having no circuits at all — like a gangrenous limb.”

Nightingale nods _far_ too knowingly, for that subject. “How, then, does this interact with the doctor’s tattoos?”

At this, they both turn to look at him expectantly, and Romani looks between them, feeling as if he’s under glass. With all the times he’s had people look to him for answers, he’d think he’s used to it, and yet …

He closes his eyes and shakes his head a little, trying to find the words to explain something that had been transmitted to him through feeling and sense, through the burdensome weight of magic saturating his flesh and the twining whisper of the demons within.

He doesn’t want to tell them this …

But Nightingale is right. They _need_ comprehensive medical records. It wouldn’t be fair … it could even be dangerous.

He’s already practically told Ritsuka, if not in so many words.

“The tattoos are a territory,” he says, and hears Paracelsus’s in-drawn breath.

“I am unfamiliar with the theory of territories,” Nightingale says, “though I understand the concept. It imbues a place with magical barriers, does it not?”

“There’s many ways territories can be created,” says Paracelsus, sounding rather distracted by the thought. “Often they involve physical locations, however, yes — they’re simply the easiest to ward and define. The Temple of Solomon is perhaps only the most famous example.”

“The Temple of Solomon was burned to the ground,” Nightingale points out briskly.

“I’m sitting right here,” Romani mutters, and then freezes, his eyes snapping open. “I mean, uh —”

Paracelsus laughs, but softly, and a little strained. Romani relates. “Ah, but I hear it wasn’t — not the true territory, at least. You used it in the Singularity, did you not?”

“This is getting off-topic,” says Romani, because it _is_ and also he doesn’t want to have to discuss the fact of his empire having fallen apart because he’d been compelled to trade Israel’s longevity for humanity’s gift. It’s — it’s a sore point. He feels a little bitter about it. It’s just better not to think about it.

Of course, on-topic means talking about his tattoos, which is only marginally better. “Territories don’t _have_ to be locations, it’s just what people think of first. They can be anything — anything imbued and owned — and they can be created to _do_ anything — or house anything, limited only by a mage’s personal power and daring.”

“And so you elevated your magical circuits to a territory,” says Paracelsus.

“And so I did,” Romani agrees with a sigh. “Where else were the 72 going to live? They served as the magical circuits for the whole of humanity, until it sank in well enough that they weren’t needed.”

It’s unexpectedly easy to talk about it, for having talked about it before, over the radio. Not much better, and it makes him feel numb and tired at once, but the words aren’t getting stuck in his throat and they aren’t stumbling.

He hates it. A lot.

“Then it is made to be a dwelling,” Paracelsus persists.

“That’s what Ars Paulina was,” Romani says. “That’s what the temple was.”

“Can you still access it?”

Romani looks at Paracelsus, at his understated intensity, and he doesn’t know what look is on his face but even Paracelsus seems to realise his eagerness is inappropriate. He clears his throat and reels himself back.

“Ah, so, in essence — we ought to be treating your magical circuits as a biological function in connection with a magical construct. Is that about so?”

“Yes,” says Romani, feeling alarmingly calm despite the fact his pulse throbs in his ears. “That’s about so.”

“Magical circuits and magical constructs are two different things,” says Nightingale, and she might just be the most clear-headed person in the room; and isn’t that sad, when she’s the one with madness enhancement? “Would you say, Doctor, that they are indeed still separate objects, or they are a single function at this point in time?”

At this, Romani hesitates, closing his eyes again to focus, gingerly, on the limb he’d once lost, on the sense of well-springing life which is eternal within him. Once upon a time, looking this way would have meant seeing the Throne framed in every window, every door, every shadow cast with a sharp enough angle — for days.

Now, looking at it feels like his breath in his lungs, the quiet work of his body, usually background, brought forth.

… He’s never had occasion to observe his body like this. As though it is his body, and his alone.

If he could reach past it to the Throne, to Ars Paulina —

He doesn’t want to know. And so, he doesn’t. But when he opens his eyes he feels a little calmer than he had, a little more stable.

“Single function,” he admits, and unexpectedly that makes relief flood through him. No attached fortress outside of time, no abstract rooms full of demons in his heart, in his mind —

No friends with whom to speak, no comfort of having something close to peers, the emptiness instead the evidence of betrayal.

Grief is a sharp-edged thing a little slower, making his eyes prickle and his throat close and his face scrunch. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, shakily. Someone puts a hand on his arm.

“Where is your pain, Doctor?” Nightingale asks, as soft as she’s ever soft, with so much keen intent in her mind and being. It’s different to Paracelsus’s intellectual lust. “You didn’t answer that, before.”

It takes Romani a moment, but he manages: “That was something else — I was thinking of Malisbury, that’s all.”

“And now?”

Romani exhales again, and it’s still shaky with the pain in his chest, but at least he isn’t outright sobbing on someone’s shoulder again, he guesses. A step up? “It’s — complicated.”

“Explain it,” says Nightingale.

“Florence,” says Paracelsus, his voice cuttingly gentle, “he’s grieving. There’s no treatment for that but time. Even you must accept there are some things you cannot heal immediately.”

Gratitude is an odd thing to feel in conjunction with pain, Romani thinks.

“Hmph.” Nightingale moves away and Romani wipes his eyes, glad for the space. He hadn’t realised how crowded he’d begun to feel. But she takes the tablet with her, and Romani can’t see what she’s writing on it. “Grieving for whom, Doctor? The demons who would have destroyed humanity?”

“I don’t need anyone to tell me how stupid it is,” Romani says thickly.

“It isn’t stupid,” says Paracelsus, sober and intent, and with his gaze still on Romani’s face, and his hand still on Romani’s arm. “It isn’t stupid to feel for beings with whom you connected. Not all worth in this world is defined by being human. They meant something to you. That is enough.”

…. Romani should have guessed that Paracelsus, of all people, might understand — he who had sought to create his own life. Romani exhales a third time and this time the tears fall; but it feels less like something choking him than he thought it would.

“Yes, that is true,” says Nightingale, still from a distance, and although she’s reduced to a soggy silhouette in Romani’s vision, he sees her turn. “So for what _do_ you grieve, Your Majesty?”

Oh, no, now she’s doing it. Somehow, it hurts more coming from her. But —

She had said what. Not whom: _what_.

Tears and words crowd Romani’s throat, and he takes a deep breath, and releases it with a hard bite of something that might be a sob, might be a laugh. He really doesn’t know. “That I wasn’t able to save them, okay? They were the nearest things to friends I had, and they were beings — _people_ — I dominated into service, and I filled their minds with visions of the grandeur of humanity’s potential … And I wasn’t able to show them how to love.”

He hadn’t even known how to love himself.

“There,” says Nightingale, sounding satisfied as she turns to slot the tablet into its pocket, where the equipment controls are. “ _Now_ we may begin treatment.”

Paracelsus sighs. “She’s been a tyrant since you’ve been gone,” he confides as Romani rubs his face, trying vainly to stop it being quite so wet. “If you like, I can distract her while you escape.”

Romani shakes his head, his throat closing for a minute. “I want to know what’s been happening here,” he says, and even though his voice is tremulous for the damned tears, it doesn’t break. “I want to know what I’ve missed. This _is_ my space. This is _my_ infirmary. I want to save people. I _want_ to.”

His words get firmer as he says them. Even despite the tears, despite the hard rock lodged under his ribs, this — this feels like something solid under his feet, and not a half-there vision of a path he’s not certain he can trust.

“It’s convenient,” says Nightingale as she turns back to them, “when patients are able to treat themselves. Yes, of course, Doctor. Paracelsus and I will take you through the changes in your infirmary. Now, here’s some tissues. Blow your nose. We must keep this area as hygienic as possible.”

It is, Romani discovers, extremely difficult to obey that directive when he’s too busy laughing.


	10. You're not alone

The rest of that day is — nice. Good. Nightingale and Paracelsus have a lot to say, and Romani listens attentively. There have been fewer changes than Romani honestly expected. Somehow, some part of him had just assumed that whoever took over after him would … fix things, he guesses.

It’s an alarming insight into how much he had internalised that idea that he had messed up, would mess up, that it was inevitable. He needs to sit quietly to nurse his surprise at that realisation for a few minutes, while Nightingale and Paracelsus talk. 

He’s sure he remembers being surer of himself … maybe it happened less as time went on. Maybe he just remembers it less. Maybe this is just the burden of stricken terror and guilt at hiding himself for so long.

Oddly, this isn’t something that makes him cry.

The largest changes, ironically, are around his office. They had continued to use it as the hub of meetings and changes, and the senior (Servant) staff on duty had worked from there. He sits in his chair and it’s the wrong height, the arms are too low, and the lumbar support is off. Romani tries not to look too sulky about this as he readjusts things — but neither Nightingale or Paracelsus stop him sitting in it, either.

Why does he keep expecting people to stop him from doing things that ought to be his to begin with?

They take him through the patient files, at least cursorily so he can read at his leisure. Through the rooms re-opened, old friends he is slightly ashamed to shed some tears over. The fact that these can be used means there’s a big enough population to use them. Through the staff returned; and these he doesn’t weep over, but there’s something tight and large in his chest and in his sinuses as he looks through the names of people he never thought he’d see again.

Some of them show up, looking harried and annoyed, as Nightingale shows him through the rooms. Romani is conscious of the unrecognising glances, hears someone mutter, “Another one?” and knows his thought about them assuming he’s a Servant is correct.

They’re not entirely wrong.

He’s pretty sure he recognises the voice, too.

But Romani doesn’t present himself to them, and only listens attentively to Nightingale, and leaves them to their own devices — at least for today.

That night he closes his office door to sit, and wonder; to move around the room, touching all the things that had been his, and some that aren’t. He’d kept this office pretty sparse … he really doesn’t have as much as Ritsuka claimed, compared to some people. Some bits and pieces someone, probably Ritsuka, had insisted remain. The most incongruous addition is a cleaned and varnished skull someone had added to a shelf. It might be a chimera skull. Romani’s really not looking that closely.

His medical degree is gone. When he goes hunting, he finds it in one of the desk drawers, all alone and face-up, to be seen as soon as the drawer is opened.

_Then_ he has to sit and shed a few tears again; but at least he’s alone to do it.

This is his office. It’s his; it was then and it is now, and it feels like he’s lived lifetimes in this room alone — from before Malisbury to after, from preceding the Grand Order to post; and now this.

It’s more comforting than his bedroom had been. Even if he does now need to make sure there’s a box of tissues in there.

When he’s settled a bit (and got his chair _exactly_ the way it should be, thank you very much, even accounting for physiological changes) he pulls up his medical laptop to go through the medical files and staff lists. This is — soothing. Not something he honestly expected to be doing, this morning; it had felt like a too-far dream, the idea he could come back and simply step into where he had been.

But no one knocks on his door to disturb him, and he wiles away the afternoon catching up. Ritsuka’s file is larger than it was, and that makes something heavy drop in Romani’s gut; Mash’s file is larger still, with the years and years of medical notes in Romani’s own hand.

The exam from after Ars Paulina makes him put his head in his hands to cry some more, out of pure relief that she’s as alive and well as he could possibly have hoped, never dared to imagine. The note about her magical circuits is — well. Daunting, but it seems … less than it was, when following the knowledge that _Mash will live_.

His own file is incomplete, pending further physical examinations. That’s … probably fair. They hadn’t really gotten into the physical examinations, only the magical ones. Maybe Romani can leave that for tomorrow … no, _definitely_ , he’s going to leave that for tomorrow.

It takes until the lights turn off for stillness before Romani rouses with a yawn and a blink, rubbing his eyes and glancing at the clock.

… _Whoops_ , it is _long_ past nightfall.

This, too, is familiar, and Romani laughs softly at himself as he makes sure the files he’s been looking at are accessible from the laptop in his room on its medical partition, and then shuts down this one and rises to leave.

It’s night; the nurses’ voices are soft at the desk; and as Romani turns off the lights and closes the door, for the first time he feels like he might actually _be_ home.

* * *

Romani remembers to sleep sometime in the wee hours of the night, after he’s already been through all the updates at least once. It’s not so much a need now; or at least he feels no physiological prompting, like a rumbling stomach or falling asleep on his laptop, which had reminded him he’s only human when he’d been reborn. It’s mostly that he finishes reading the final update, looks up, and sees the time.

He’s forgotten what it was like, to not be totally concerned about physiological needs.

… It’s probably a bad thing. It _definitely_ means his magical circuits have caught up with optimising his functions. He’s going to have to be careful.

Like a good, functional adult Romani sets an alarm for 6am with a bonus note that he needs to _eat_ — because he’s pretty sure he forgot to have dinner last night — and then he goes to bed.

Sleeping, it proves, doesn’t come all that easily. Not because his magical circuits are getting in the way — there’s nothing they do that his body shouldn’t already be doing, and when he remembers to do those things it’s all for the better.

No, he just can’t turn off his brain. Romani closes his eyes and breathes in the darkness, and sleep is a lurking thing, but he doesn’t fall. At least, he doesn’t feel like he falls; but somewhere in the doze the alarm goes off and he wakes up passingly groggy.

He must have slept. He doesn’t feel like it.

… Does he remember sirens going off?

For a few moments Romani lays where he is, listening; but there’s nothing. No alarms, nothing but the soft hum of electronics and the burr of the distantly howling wind against the walls of the facility.

His phone rings again, this time with the reminder to eat, and Romani can’t help but smile a little as he levers himself up to get dressed and ready for the day. Ah, this is familiar … if it weren’t for the heavy braids, he might forget that anything’s happened at all.

It’s early enough that the halls are pretty empty — just before the next shift arrives at the kitchen to collect food and coffee. The only people up are probably Servants. It means Romani is fairly secure in moving through Chaldea without being pulled up, his tablet under his arm for the rest of his reading material over breakfast.

He doesn’t feel particularly hungry, but that’s pretty normal too.

Normal enough that normal is actually vaguely normal, and not shades of acutely surreal, unless he thinks about things just a little too hard. He really could forget that anything had happened at all …

But when he enters the cafeteria, it’s not the early risers who are scattered between the tables, but Servants: here Enkidu, picking hummingly over the fruit bowl; there Cu Chulainn and Robin at a table with a set of dice, a bowl of pretzels and, at least on Cu Chulainn’s part, a savage grin. It’s not the cheerful, perfectly human chefs with food to serve on the tables, but Emiya, looking appraisingly at Romani’s hair.

“Better,” says Emiya, a little grudgingly. “Looks like it’s painful on the neck, though. You looked better with it shorter, anyway.”

He sets down the last of the bowls on the buffet table and leaves without even waiting for a response, and Romani opens his mouth and shuts it again with, honestly, nothing to say. He’s not sure whether to feel relieved Emiya hadn’t made him have to engage, or a little miffed the conversation had been so one-sided.

He has the freedom to be ambivalent. That’s enough.

Romani picks out something — anything; he’s not paying that much attention — and finds a corner where he will, hopefully, not get all that disturbed. He sets his alarm so he won’t get so absorbed as to forget he wants to leave before the morning rush, and unlocks his tablet. It’s hard, at first, to pay attention to what he’s reading, to not be aware of the Heroic Spirits lingering; to try not to wonder if Robin’s hood is raised so he can watch without being seen to be watchful.

Cu Chulainn cares less about being seen. The first pretzel that lands on Romani’s tablet, he blinks at and sets aside. The second might have gotten lost in his hair. The third, he just eats; and then, after a moment’s thought, the first one as well. Look, he’s not the one being the child here.

He’s pretty sure he hears Cu Chulainn snicker, though, and no more pretzels are forthcoming after that.

Perversely, it makes it easier to ignore them. If that’s the worst he’s going to get —

It’s not the worst he’s going to get.

He hasn’t run into Ramesses, yet.

Another one of those things he’s not thinking about.

At any rate, Romani gets genuinely absorbed enough to be only distantly aware of the few Servants entering or leaving — the cafeteria doesn’t fill, or show any indication of approaching a level of ‘full’, and his alarm hasn’t gone off; as long as those things hold true, there’s nothing to worry about.

Which is why it’s a surprise when someone draws out a chair next to him and sits down, and why Romani is not at all prepared to look up and see Martha beside him, watching him quietly and with a steady gaze.

He freezes. Of course he does. Martha is someone else he’s been avoiding.

His throat works and he coughs, and Martha does not rescue him from his sudden half-panic by saying anything. Of course she doesn’t. Sometimes he really hates people being all secure around him.

(Sometimes he remembers that that used to be him … but it was him with conviction that had been only borrowed.)

“Ah … Martâ … Good morning?”

“Good morning, Your Majesty,” says Martha quietly and without at all shifting her gaze.

Romani cannot even begin to hide the wince. “Please don’t call me that.”

Her gaze does not shift. “Why? It is what you are, is it not?”

“It’s …” Romani waves his spoon a little, searching for an appropriate word, and finally settles lamely on: “Embarrassing.” It’s not even remotely serviceable for what he wants to say — but it kind of approaches the same feeling. Romani seizes on the moment in which Martha’s brow crinkles to say: “You’re not planning to eat?”

She glances down at the bare table between her arms, and Romani is hopeful for one moment that she’ll go and get some food and he can make his escape before she returns. Then she looks up. “I’ll have something in a minute. I felt compelled to speak to you first, Your Majesty.”

… He’s not escaping this, is he? Romani closes his eyes and takes a bracing breath, and lets it out as a sigh. “What about?” After a moment he adds, a little hopefully: “If I ordered you not to call me that, would it work?”

Her mouth tugs slightly before it firms up to something more determined. “Probably not.”

“Then what’s the point of people telling me I have the title?” Romani grumbles, and her mouth tugs again.

“You tell me, Your Majesty. I am one of the few here who is _not_ a king.”

“The non-kings still outnumber the kings,” Romani points out defensively.

“For now,” says Martha. “For now. Certainly their opinions are many and varied.”

“That’s part of the nature of kings,” Romani says, and then realises he’s having an _actual conversation about this as if he is one of them_ and adds quickly, “I’m told.”

He looks back down at his tablet and is _this_ close to just deciding to ignore her and hope she goes away, now acutely aware of who’s still in the hall and whether they’re paying attention. Enkidu is gone, thank goodness; Cu Chulainn isn’t _overtly_ paying attention, but that says nothing about Robin, nor Billy, who has joined them.

Romani’s on the verge of rising when Martha reaches out to take his hand and cradle it in hers. Her gaze, he is sure, has not shifted since.

“Is it so shameful, to be seen as a king?” she asks softly. “O wisdom of Israel, ancestor of the Messiah — is it so very shameful to you, to be known of the lineage which produced the light of the world?”

Oh, _damn it_. Romani’s vision blurs and his throat tightens. Would it even matter if he tried to dispute the whole ‘messiah’ thing? That’s a religious argument he just can’t do right now. “That was my brother’s lineage,” he says after a moment, because in lieu of the other, that’s all he has. “It wasn’t me.”

“It’s your family.”

“It wasn’t me.” This is more forceful, through the lump in his throat, and Romani swallows down the tears and breathes evenly until they don’t fall. There. That’s an achievement, after the last couple of days.

And Martha still hasn’t looked away; and Romani realises, belatedly, that she’s tricked him into acknowledging who he’d been, who he _was_ and is, and —

“Would you feel so very burdened if I prayed for you, o wisdom of Israel?” Martha asks steadily, and Romani exhales, and gently but insistently pulls back his hand until she lets it go and he can pick up his tablet.

“Only if you do it where I can hear it.”

He gets up and leaves, breakfast only mostly-finished, not even bothering to put the plates on the dirties table — he can’t. He just can’t, right now.

This is why he’d been avoiding as many of the saints as possible.

Romani keeps his head down as he hurries back to his room. There’s a few more people around, and he doesn’t — he can’t have them stopping him, questioning him. The tears are held at bay for now, the tightness in his chest a vise. It’s endurable, if he can get — somewhere else.

By the time he gets to his room, he’s mostly mastered himself again; but the force of the emotions in him have left him feeling tired and wrung, and locked up his chest and throat. And he’d been going so well last night, too …

_“Would you feel so very burdened if I prayed for you,_ _o_ _wisdom of Israel?”_

Why did she have to go straight for the place that hurts him the most, the one he doesn’t dare touch or even _acknowledge_ , because if he does it would surpass everything else?

Romani swipes his door open and hurries in as if fleeing the flood of footsteps and voices from down the hall, where a group of newly-returned staff are no doubt on their way to the cafeteria. He’s in a hurry enough that he doesn’t look around the room, doesn’t check to see if he’s _actually alone_ before he slumps with a sigh against the closed door.

At which point he realises the King of Heroes is lounging on his bed, flicking through one of his books with a distasteful twist to his mouth.

It’s not even him as a Caster, which would have been bad enough. This is unfiltered Gilgamesh, only half-dressed as if going bare-chested is a fashion statement, and with the vivid red markings on his shoulders that speak of trials and vicious conviction.

Romani groans and lets his head thunk back. “Not you.”

“You’ve been expecting me, Physician,” says Gilgamesh, and then he looks up with the curve of the smile that looks like fangs. “Or have you reclaimed yourself as _Mage_ , now?”

“Physician is _just fine_ ,” says Romani stubbornly, and listens to the people outside his door, passing by in a flurry of steps and conversation, as if there isn’t a care in the world. “What do you want?”

Why _now_? Romani still has nightmares of that terrible moment in Fuyuki when Gilgamesh insisted on attending the wreckage of the Greater Grail, when Gilgamesh had spoken to him directly, if circumspectly, of things that should not have been said, should not have been _known_. Even though Gilgamesh had, in the end, kept his peace, the terror of that moment lingered, and in Romani’s nightmares he isn’t circumspect; in Romani’s nightmares it’s like Holmes pointing at a culprit to declare, _You did this!_

To have to deal with Gilgamesh _now,_ so soon after Martha …

Gilgamesh throws his book aside and Romani stares at it with belligerent resignation as Gilgamesh rises, stretching like this room is his own, like he has every right to it. He’s feeling like an asshole today, apparently.

“We have a conversation to finish, Mage,” he says, still with that dangerous smile.

“Which one?” Romani asks, his tone a little too sharp to be droll, a little too sarcastic to be wry. He’d spent almost as much time avoiding Gilgamesh as he had the saints — not because he hadn’t known, but because he _had_. Sometimes Romani had tried to imagine going to Gilgamesh, confide in him, speak frankly of who Romani was and what situation they were in, all the things that Gilgamesh had made it plain he knew …

Romani had chickened out, every single time, chickened out of even _imagining_ it for more than a few seconds. He’d barely been able to face himself, in the silence of his own non-magical soul. To have to face it at Gilgamesh, even with Gilgamesh flaunting it in his face, as Archer, as Caster …

Even if Gilgamesh had been a kinder man, Romani couldn’t have done it. He hadn’t even been able to speak openly to Da Vinci.

But now Gilgamesh is here, in his room, and filling it the way so many of these heroes do, the way kings and leaders always do. He picks something up by Romani’s desk and turns with the rose in hand, an odd cutting, _knowing_ smile on his face. Romani knows that smile.

He’s worn it himself on occasion, back when he’d been properly clairvoyant.

“The first, o King of Mages,” says Gilgamesh. “The very first.”

Romani’s heart skips a beat and thuds against the inside of his ribs, and for just an instant when he inhales, he smells cedarwood and frankincense.

… He’s not sure he’s entirely imagining them, either.

“I don’t remember leaving that conversation unfinished,” he says, more steadily than he thought he’d be able to do.

“Not from your perspective, perhaps,” says Gilgamesh, “but I saw that we would continue. My journey is yet undone, o immortal.”

Good _grief_. Does _everyone_ just know about that? Did the Old Man of the Mountain just _swoop down_ and decide to inform a handful of the most irritatingly persistent Servants in the whole of Chaldea? Romani sighs again, thunks his head back. 

“And if I refuse?”

Gilgamesh smiles as savagely as he knows how. “Then I will drag you through the halls on my back, and you will be humiliated further.”

And he would do it, too.

“So this isn’t even a conversation I get to have in private, then?” Romani asks sourly, and Gilgamesh neither confirms or denies: simply waits, turning the rose between his fingers with that alarmingly amused smile. Romani thunks his head once more, winces at the dull ache of the braids that get caught behind it, and levers himself off the door to put his tablet down on the nearest accessible surface. “Fine. Lead the way.”

This, of all things, makes Gilgamesh’s smile sour to daggers proper. “Tch.”

He strides forward and the door opens, and Romani trails behind, feeling belligerent and irritable. Well, at least this has stopped the tears — it’s very hard to cry in front of Gilgamesh when he’s such a raging bastard to begin with.

Also, he still has the rose, and that’s unfair. Even if it came from Merlin, it’s still Romani’s rose. He’s claiming it. It’s in _his_ room.

Asshole.

Gilgamesh moves through the halls like he owns the place, as he ever has; and it’s not until they’re more than halfway there that Romani realises they’re heading toward the recreational areas; and then he has to swallow a strangled noise.

Going to a place he’s broken down twice is a really bad idea in front of this man.

… That’s exactly why he’s doing it, isn’t it? Yep.

Gilgamesh thrusts open the doors to the gym as if he’s storming into his ziggurat in a fury, and Romani trails in after, a few too many steps behind to really be part of this of his own free will. When he glances around, the room is empty.

“You know, I really thought more people would be using this room than there have been,” he says, as snidely as he can.

“You think I cannot clear a room if I wished it, Mage?” says Gilgamesh without looking over. He strides into the middle, where the mats have overtaken the centre and the areas to the side which had once belonged to some other things. That’s a relief — it’s away from the bikes, away from that corner where Romani has already utterly humiliated himself.

“I’m not hearing anything about that conversation you wanted to continue,” Romani says stubbornly, moving after him, but more slowly. On purpose: _he’s_ not the one in a rush, here.

Gilgamesh isn’t smiling now, but there’s an intent in his eyes which is, really, quite alarming. “Do you not remember all of that conversation, O King of Mages?”

“Remind me,” says Romani, and can’t help the edges in his tone.

Gilgamesh smiles. Romani has the distinct feeling he’s about to be shown up.

“You sat before a forest of cedarwood.” Gilgamesh raises his arms, pointing. “Before me, like this, as I stumbled from the darkness of the mountain Mashu. Did you name your daughter after it, I wonder?”

The dull flush rising in Romani’s cheeks feels ugly and bloated, a mixture of embarrassment and — something else. Being seen _sucks_. “I never said that.”

“You are so very transparent in your second life, Mage,” says Gilgamesh, looking satisfied. “Twin peaks, one looking to the sunset, the past; one to the sunrise, the future. The girl with the heart burdened by history, driving onward. Truly, you are poetic.”

“You didn’t bring me here just to give me backhanded compliments,” Romani says as steadily as he can manage; but his face is hot and that probably isn’t going to change. His heart is pounding, and that’s probably not going to change either. “And in point of fact, I was sitting in front of the House of the Forest of Lebanon.”

“Timber harvested from the woods which lay at the foot of Mashu,” counters Gilgamesh, still looking amused. “Is it a wonder our clairvoyance collided? I, in the depths of my despair; you, at the height of your vision. Do you recall what you said to me?”

His heart is really, _really_ loud. Romani has to remember to breathe through it. If he doesn’t say anything —

Gilgamesh _certainly_ will.

Damn it. Romani really hates all this play-acting, this being strung along.

“Your face is bitten by sorrow,” he says in a low voice, gaze fixed on Gilgamesh. “Why do you have the look of one who has suffered a long journey? Why is it you roam the wilderness?”

Even as he speaks, he can almost smell his garden; the varied and mingled scents, never discordant. His garden had been beautiful, and soothing, and a place of solace. He can almost feel beneath his bare feet the cool flat surface of the House of Forest of Lebanon’s glass floor. The wind outside the nearest outside wall of the Chaldea might be the breeze rustling leaves.

“I am one whose grief lives in his heart,” answers Gilgamesh, in the cadence of ritual, “for the death of Enkidu, my companion, whom I loved. Must I die too? What of Gilgamesh? I seek the man they call the far-away, the immortal, the one who has avoided death. If I must, I will cross the waters of death; if I must, I will stand upon the flood.”

“And have you?” Romani asks, his voice tight as it’s never been in the grip of clairvoyance; so tight it’s painful. Yet, he can’t _not_ respond: he doesn’t know where Gilgamesh is headed, but the memory grips him just that hard.

_“I have not,”_ Gilgamesh had said in the past, _“but I will, if I must. Tell me where I may find the far-away, King of Mages.”_

_“Beyond the waters of death, King of Heroes, through a white desert, on the shores of the river that once flooded the world. Wither thou goest, death goes also. Even you cannot escape such a fate. Even Gilgamesh will die. But not forever, I think.”_

_“One who dies is not immortal.”_

_“How long does a building stand before it falls? How long will brothers share the inheritance before they quarrel? How long does hatred last? Everything dies, Gilgamesh. Even gods may die. Death is not an end for all.”_

Gilgamesh smiles, and even without the intensity of clairvoyance, even without rainbows casting themselves as images across the walls, Romani can feel fates meeting. It’s an odd clarity which branches from every point they touch, like glass instead of rainbows; not something that numbs or speaks through him, but simply strips away the illusion reality affords.

“I have,” says Gilgamesh, “crossed the waters of death to find you, o immortal; I have crossed the icy desert; we stand now on the mouth of the river that would flood the world were it unleashed.”

“And do you still fear death, King of Heroes?” Romani asks steadily.

“Fear it? No.” Romani _really_ doesn’t like the smile Gilgamesh is wearing as he extends his empty hand to the side, fingers wide. “But I _fight_ it, with every breath, with every action I take, which is more than I can say about you.” From the air there’s a dull thud of a bell as a blade slides through the fabric of existence into his grip.

Romani watches it, thinks a little dizzily, _Oh, so that’s about to happen,_ and remembers again to exhale, to inhale, to _keep breathing_. “I’d rather not test that ‘immortal’ assertion, if you don’t mind.”

“I never said,” says Gilgamesh, “that this blade is for _you_.”

There’s footsteps behind Romani, and the door creaks open, and Romani’s insides turn to ice as Mash’s hesitant voice sounds out: “Um, King Gilgamesh? Enkidu said you needed me here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a) The King of Heroes came home for Thanksgiving, and his first Interlude made it pretty plain that not only did he know who Romani is ("Mage. No, I see that you refer yourself as a Doctor."), but they've spoken before ("That Physician always seeks the last word...").
> 
> b) Based on the above I went leafing through my copy of the Epic. The flashback conversation herein is set just after Gilgamesh exits Mashu. Scholars suggest that, based on the Akkadian version of the text, the exit from Mashu would have been in or near Lebanon (according to wikipedia, anyway). In the Epic, Gilgamesh does go across the sea and meet with various people, including Utnapishtim, the immortal. I co-opted that role for Solomon, based on descriptions in the text which dovetailed too well with what I'd already been planning.
> 
> c) The version of the Epic from which I drew inspiration is by David Ferry, with some direct dialogue quoted/paraphrased. Ferry's version not a direct translation of the Epic but an adaptation, in case anyone goes looking -- but it's widely considered the most spiritually accurate version of the text.
> 
> d) Yes, the mountain is actually called Mashu. For those who don't get the reference, the JP version of the game has Mash's name as Mashu, though since English tends to drop the u sound Japanese has I'm not surprised by the choice of transliteration. Mashu seems a more dignified choice as a name than just plain _Mash_ , though, which has only so many meanings; and I can well imagine the staff of an international facility seeing 'Mashu' and assuming it's Japanese. This is how linguistic evolution begins.


	11. There has always been heartache and pain

“Mash,” Romani says as calmly as he can despite the sudden terror seizing his insides. “Please leave.”

“Um …” She sounds startled and confused, and he can’t blame her; but there’s ice in his chest and his throat and he doesn’t dare take his eyes off Gilgamesh. “S- sorry, I didn’t know I’d be interrupting something, I’ll just —”

The doors thud shut, and the chains rattling across them are louder still; and Mash’s confusion takes a concerned edge.

“The — the doors are locked.”

“Enkidu,” Romani says, in tones not even surprised, and Gilgamesh flashes a grin without moving — yet.

“My friend told me of your conversation with the saint,” he says, and the smile vanishes for something haughty and condemning. “Fool.”

“Why are you doing this?” Romani asks in a low voice.

“How long does hatred last, Mage?” Gilgamesh asks back, equally low and with eyes piercing. “When hatred dies, what is left? Nothing born … nothing achieved … I told you, you fool, I told you: when you face this thing, remember what it is you protect. And yet, and yet — you stand here, returned to the world, and insist again and again that you are not a king, that there is _nothing you have created which is worthy_.”

Romani smiles, and it feels like something papering over the pound of his heart terrified in his chest. “You said once that humans have no value. You sound like you’re offended I might agree with you, at least in this case.” Mash makes an objecting noise behind him, but Romani can’t stop, on a reckless speeding train of sharp-edged truths. “Funny; I thought you’d be delighted that one of us finally accepts that.”

After all, if he created nothing with his own hands, with his own will — then there’s no worth in him, by Gilgamesh’s own logic. Romani can’t see what’s making him so angry about that. It’s like he wants Romani to be worth something.

Gilgamesh’s gaze could well be made of daggers. “And you are called wise? I said also that I love results. Gaze upon the fruits of your labour, O King of Mages: by the names you are known, by the future you have wrought, by the lives you have touched. But if truly all you wish is empty idleness, never striving, never _acting_ , then I will cut you down in this moment: and your _worthless_ foundling with you.”

“Don’t —”

Gilgamesh moves from a stand-still to a rush before Romani can even finish the word: and Romani knows without looking at he’s aiming for Mash, he _knows_ it. Romani throws himself backward, twisting as he goes; catching Mash with his body and sending them both to the ground as Gilgamesh’s sword cuts the air where they’d been. Romani scoops Mash up hurriedly and flings them aside again as blades thud into the floor, his heart in his throat and the air around them rippling for all Gilgamesh’s weapons held in abeyance.

And then no longer held in abeyance.

Blade-edges are framed on rainbows, openings a gleaming flash of prismatic warning. Mash clutches tight to him as Romani moves, again and again and just _this_ shade off being cut by the weapons whistling past them.

“Will you flee at every turn?” Gilgamesh roars, and weapons rise, gathering as an impenetrable wall flinging itself at Romani. There’s nowhere _to_ dodge, crap crap crap — Romani throws them both behind the punching-bag, feels weapons thud against fabric; feels the tip of one cut through, nicking his back. Could be worse. He almost doesn’t notice. “ _Fight_ , you coward of a king!”

“I don’t know how!” Romani screams back from the teetering safety of the bag. He rushes away from it as it falls beneath the weight of all the weapons bristling in it, Mash still cradled in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. “Is that what you want to hear?! _I don’t know how_!”

Gilgamesh stands in the middle of the floor, a grin of a snarl on his face and weapons ejecting themselves from the air into the space around him. “Fool! Even the coward of a flower-mage has a better sense of self-preservation than you!”

Oh, bringing up Merlin right now is a _low blow_.

An axe launches itself toward them and Romani hops over a bench, skips around one of the weight machines and winces at the shriek of steel meeting steel as the axe gets tangled in it. “You think I don’t know that?!”

“Then change it, o _wise king of Israel_ ,” says Gilgamesh, his voice all full of mockery.

“I don’t know how!”

How many times does he have to say it? Romani’s heart is in his throat, and he can barely get the words out. Desperation is a vise in his chest, tears in his eyes, and what’s left of his clairvoyance is barely enough to tell him where sharp edges will be — not how to get out of this, nothing about how to resolve Gil’s contradictory fury, no insight as to what Romani can say that will _fix it_.

“Then you’ll both die here,” says Gilgamesh, and spreads both his hands to make the weapons around him come to attention. He’s still holding the rose, Romani sees numbly. “Unless you can act of your own strength, instead of borrowing someone else’s. Not your god’s, not your demons’, not the youthful exuberance of tomorrow’s warriors. _Yours_.”

The wall of weapons rushes toward them and Romani drops behind a turned-over bench, using it as a shield, as much as he can — putting his body between splintering metal and Mash.

The bench isn’t nearly as thick as the punching-bag had been. Romani feels something pierce his back, pushes Mash away from him with a gasp in case it goes through him.

“Go, go —”

Pain follows a few seconds late, like a blow which spreads paralysing through his body from where he’s been stabbed; and, strangely, it cuts through terror to an odd crystal clarity such that Romani hears, more than feels or intends, the incantation spilling from him at the second bench. “Take her form, show yourself as Mash; air, shroud her escape, let her not be seen —”

It probably won’t work. It’s not much, there’s only a few moments before Gilgamesh’s weapons yank back to show the King of Heroes what he’s wrought —

But it’s enough, because when Gilgamesh’s boot falls nearby, and nudges the bench, he lets out a twisted sound of startled laughter to see the illusion fall away. Romani stirs and bites back pain, pushing himself to his feet. It feels the same as it had in this very room, hauling himself off the floor from despair.

He feels so heavy, it’s almost a surprise when Gilgamesh slams him so easily against the wall, and even more a surprise at how easily Gilgamesh’s sword enters his side, through his back and into steel behind.

 _Like cutting through butter,_ Romani thinks numbly, and then vows to never think that again, if he gets out of this.

“Doctor!” Mash screams from somewhere only marginally closer to the doors, and Romani groans and then laughs; and then the pain hits, _again_ , like falling into an icy river.

“Stand upright, Mage,” says Gilgamesh low, “or you’ll cut yourself further.”

In as far as warnings go, that’s just about the worst Romani’s ever heard; but he manages to lock his shaking knees so he doesn’t fall, so the ominous, agonising scrape of blade against rib doesn’t turn into something worse. His vision is wonky, burning white, and every breath is quick and short, trembling as pain steals away the air he’s gathered. His shaking hands reach up, trying to find where he’s impaled, trying to find the sword’s hilt —

Gilgamesh’s fingers close around his. He lifts a hand and Romani flinches; but it’s the one holding the rose, just the rose, oddly delicate in Gilgamesh’s palm.

“Poor lonely half-demon, locked away in his tower,” says Gilgamesh. “I wonder if it pains him to know all his efforts have been for naught — that the man he wished to save even now denies the burden of love.”

Romani’s heart is rushing so hard in his ears that it takes a few seconds for this to sink in. “What — what are you —”

Oh, that hurts. Oh, that _hurts_. Romani bites back on a whimper, can’t quite keep it in. Oh, crap. Oh, _crap_ , this _really hurts —_

Even surrendering himself hadn’t hurt like this. Even Goetia striking at him hadn’t been _this;_ even Asmodeus, pounding on the temple of his soul, hadn’t filled him with this hot cutting agony, this sense of his own physical life slipping away from under his fingers. His magical circuits throb in him, slower than his heart as if startled by the sudden need to be _used_ ; but Romani feels magic trying to seal flesh, trying to keep itself in.

“Fool,” says Gilgamesh, his voice oddly echoing and distant through the rush of Romani’s pulse. “Do you think a modern technical genius could have reached beyond death? Do you think mere striplings could have sought you out past the edges of the world? It was not Da Vinci who slipped through dreams to gather your stardust; it was not Mash who anchored you to life; it was not Master who flung herself into the void to draw on the tenuous chains that brought you back.”

… Merlin did that?

 _Merlin_?

Gilgamesh’s fingers fold in, crushing the rose in his fist, and Romani lets out a noise of — he doesn’t know. Pain, objection, despair, _pain_. Gilgamesh lets it fall to Romani’s feet and turns, and Romani blinks away sweat and tears to try and focus his wavering vision on Mash, stalwart Mash, obviously limping and holding a long broken-off pole from one of the wrecked machines. There’s tears on her cheeks, but her mouth is set as she lifts the bar.

“King Gilgamesh, _stop_!”

“Even now,” says Gilgamesh without even turning back to Romani, “you lean on the strength of children, for you have none of your own.”

It’s really hard to breathe.

… It’s also a _really bad idea_ to start crying from sheer pain when he’s got a _sword_ this close to his lungs. Romani reaches out, groping for — something, anything; trying to pull Gilgamesh back by sleeves or collar or _anything_. But the King of Heroes isn’t wearing a robe, only linen pants and armour on his hips, which afford no grip; and Romani’s fingers find nothing to hold.

“Gil — gamesh —”

Something’s pounding, and it’s not Romani’s heart, this time. Distant past the walls of the gym, he can hear Ritsuka’s voice shouting. At least _someone’s_ noticed something …

But it’s not soon enough for Mash. Gilgamesh reaches out and a spear ejects itself out of the air, puts itself into his grip, and Romani can see in his back all the ways he can murder Mash with barely a thought, because Mash, right now, isn’t a Servant; Mash, right now, cannot defend herself against the likes of this.

If after all this, Romani has to watch her die in the halls of her _home_ —

Their home.

“Don’t.” This is a gasp of a word, bitted-off; but it’s a start. Romani’s wet fingers fumble for grip on the sword’s hilt, and he presses himself trembling against the wall so he can search the floor with his foot, seeking the fallen rose. Hot blood is a thick wet cascade down his side, down his hip and leg. It’s enough. It has to be enough.

“Stop me, Mage,” says Gilgamesh without turning, and all the weapons in the room rattle as they lift, aiming for Mash. Gilgamesh lifts a hand, ready to signal.

“You —” Romani hisses long, replacing fumble with sound, with _something_ that can still carry power in it without letting it diffuse for panic. His toes land on something made of crushed sinew and stabbing into his sole, and he grinds the ball of his foot down on it until he feels the stem twine around his ankle, until he can feel it feeding greedily off him, and bloom. 

“— _Servant_! Servant, Archer, you stand on the flood, the ground of the far-away; you _will not_ murder the innocent here on this ground, within the walls of sanctuary, you _cannot_ —”

He isn’t; he isn’t, but trembling for it, for the power in Romani’s directive clashing with his own will. Romani’s not his Master — Romani can’t _seal_ him — but —

“ _This is my land_ , and _you,_ King of Heroes, _you_ don’t decide who lives and dies here — this is _mine_.”

 _Grow,_ Romani commands the rose silently, because Gilgamesh is shaking like something about to explode, and Romani’s not totally sure his command will _last_. _Grow and grow and leash him, chain him —_ grow _—!_

The rose explodes into a lash of boughs and thorns, slapping weapons down, cocooning Mash and flinging Gilgamesh across the room. Romani finds some purchase on the sword-hilt, braces himself with a breath; commands strength to his arms and _pushes_ , his side and the steel wall screaming at him, until the sword comes loose and clatters to the ground. The sudden release of it seems to give his knees permission to lose all their strength, and it takes everything in him _not_ to just fall to the floor.

He’s going to throw up.

 _Don’t throw up_ , Romani orders himself. _Whatever you do, do not throw up._

The thought of how much that will hurt is enough to swallow bile, and Romani presses his hand to his side and pushes magic into him, forcibly knitting together flesh and nerves. He bites his tongue trying to keep in the scream of pain, and isn’t totally sure he succeeds: that’s even _worse_ than just being stabbed, having weeks of healing shoved into his body in a few seconds.

Again he feels the sudden drought in his magic reserves, the unexpectedness of using something he’s never really had to use before; but now he can move, at least a little. Enough to push himself off the wall and stumble over to where Mash sits wide-eyed in a circle of belligerently protective rose-thorns, still gripping the broken bar.

“Doctor,” she whispers as he sinks down next to her, gasping.

“Are you — okay — Mash?”

“I — I think I twisted my ankle,” she confesses.

Oh. That’s why she didn’t get further away then she did.

Somewhere distant there’s the sounds of wreckage being thrown off, and Gilgamesh cursing, and Mash’s eyes widen further, her gaze darting behind Romani’s shoulder. “Um …”

Crap.

This is not going to end well.

Romani lets out a shaky exhale and shoves magic into his side some more, until he feels skin seal and clots flake away, and this time doing so doesn’t tax everything he has, however briefly. This time, it feels like a muscle beginning to delight in being worked, and magic is still _there_ , ready to be used. Still not honed — but there.

“Judgement is upon you,” he hears behind him, furious and snarling and resonant, and Romani pushes himself upright, turning. Gilgamesh’s eyes blaze, and light warps around him as he reaches for the sword that ends all other swords, its silhouette an inverted shadow becoming reality.

The whole of Chaldea is behind him, Romani thinks with distant calm. The gym is on the edges of the facility, and Gilgamesh’s back to its outer wall; his Noble Phantasm would puncture through every hall, every room, consume everything in its path.

If it hits.

“This is the edge of the world,” he hears himself say, and he isn’t thinking; this is that measure of colourless glass, where everything is of simple clarity and no conscious thought is needed, and nothing speaks through him but the still small voice of himself. “Here, reality bows; here, time and space and all the powers of history yield —”

“Behold the crushing might of my Sword of Rupture —”

“I command thee, as sovereign of this ground —”

“ _Enuma Elish_!”

“ _Bend._ ”

The light of Enuma Elish strikes Romani’s distortion like a gong, and Romani braces himself arms and body against the twist in spacetime that turns Enuma Elish on itself and back at its owner. Gilgamesh’s enraged scream pierces even the sound of his Noble Phantasm punching through the walls of Chaldea, exploding out into the desert of Antartica and, abruptly, cutting away.

Romani stumbles forward and almost falls as his spell dissolves, puts space where it should be and time with it. The air is filled with klaxons blaring alarm, with smoke and singed metal. Sprinklers burst with water. Snow howls in through the gaping break in the wall and flurries across Gilgamesh’s heaving back, shining with the lift of golden light.

“Has anyone ever told you —” Romani cuts off to take a coughing breath, and stumbles forward, managing not to actually fall next to Gilgamesh so much as sink mostly-controlled. “You are a _raging asshole_.”

“Fool,” Gilgamesh gasps as Romani lays a hand on his back, wills spiritons from him to the flickering Spirit Origin beside him. “Only — a fool — saves the foe — he’s just defeated.”

“Shut up,” Romani mutters. “You’re not the boss of me.”

There’s a thunderous clank as all the chains around the doors withdraw in a hurry and they burst open for Ritsuka and Enkidu. There’s others behind them — but Romani really doesn’t have the wherewithal to see who, right now, and almost can’t, through snow and smoke and water.

“Mash!” Ritsuka shouts, sounding about as panicked as she ever has.

There. That should be good enough; light’s stopped pouring off Gilgamesh in droves, anyway. Romani uses the King of Heroes to push himself to his feet, and Gilgamesh grunts but takes the added burden with trembling arms as Enkidu sinks by his side.

“Ah, did it work?” they ask, a little too cheerful-hopeful.

“We’ll see,” Gilgamesh says, but Romani ignores him to turn toward the blizzard pouring in through the hole in the wall, cold biting at his skin and snow stinging his cheeks, and his wet clothes deeply chilling against his skin.

“Can you direct yourself somewhere other than this hole for a bit, please?” he asks the wind, and he’s honestly, _really_ not sure if it’ll listen — that had been one of the powers of the rings, after all — but very suddenly the gale within the room dies. It’s still there, outside; he can see the snow gusting, can hear it howling along the lines of the facility. But here, snow is a gentle drifting thing, skating across the floor around all the wreckage of equipment and people both.

“Um,” says Ritsuka, barely audible over the ongoing klaxons and patter of water, and Romani ignores that too. He leans against the hole, considers critically how much damage there is —

A lot. An awful lot. Gilgamesh really hadn’t held back. The edges of the gap sparks where electronics have been cut away, and Romani can see debris flung down into the greyness of the blizzard, even as it vanishes. But: this side is mostly maintenance shafts and long-unused storage, and the environmental controls to keep the facility liveable.

It’s repairable. They’ll manage.

Provided the break in Chaldea’s outside boundary doesn’t freeze them all to death. His fingers ache from cold-snap warring with magic encouraging heat through his limbs. If he’s feeling it, then Mash and Ritsuka —

“Outside wall,” he says aloud, and this time with room to feel the magic on his tongue, in his body. He points. “There, to there. Steel. Triple-layered, each foot thick, hollow between. _Exist_.”

Not exactly poetic, maybe, but nevertheless the last of the wind cuts off as the wall slams into place along the outer joints, guarding them from the elements outside while providing plenty of room for clean-up and repairs without having to risk the weather.

Magic draining away only to be enthusiastically refilled in almost the same moment feels like Romani’s see-sawing on the mast of a boat, and his stomach equally enthusiastically attempts to come up again. Romani swallows it down, leaning on the wall to breathe.

Someone gets the sprinklers to turn off, and the alarms follow a split-second later, leaving heavy silence in their wake. Romani takes a final deep breath and straightens to work his way back to Mash.

“Asshole,” he mutters down at Gilgamesh as he passes, now sitting on the floor in a melting puddle of snow. He doesn’t even have the courtesy to shiver for being exposed to the elements.

“Even in victory, you failed to stand your own,” says Gilgamesh scornfully. Romani ignores him, bending down to pick up Mash, who _is_ shivering, and wet, and very cold. Romani cradles her and pushes a little more heat through him, for her to use.

“Um,” says Ritsuka again, more highly-pitched, and pointing at Romani’s blood-soaked clothes.

Gilgamesh lifts his voice. “Instead you used the flower-mage’s tools, and my own strength against me. A fool of a king, after all.”

Romani would _swear_ something in him physically snaps. He spins with Mash in his arms, cradles her tighter against her startled squeak, and glares daggers at Gilgamesh. “ _I’m not you, Gilgamesh_. I don’t fling myself wantonly into danger to prove my godliness — I don’t seek out a fight for the sake of fighting. I don’t _own_ my people; I _serve_ them! And if you think _your way_ is the _only_ one way to be a king, then —”

He bites down hard on rage and fear and righteousness, suddenly aware that they are _not_ alone, that he _has_ just claimed kingship in a room full of people, in a wreck of an arena — that this, indeed, had been Gilgamesh’s intention all along.

“Then _what_ , King of Mages?” Gilgamesh asks with a glint in his eye and a self-satisfied curl to his mouth. Romani can feel the moment here when he can pull away, hunch his shoulders, pretend he isn’t what he is —

But he _is_. He is. It seems very clear now, and in retrospect Romani has been extremely stupid. 

Romani takes a breath, and says what he’d been about to say to begin with, biting the edges of the words coldly. “Then we’re going to have many more _conversations_ like this in the future.”

He turns then to stride out of the hall, barely seeing any of the whispering witnesses, barely hearing Gilgamesh’s uproarious laugh — barely aware, even, of Ritsuka rushing along in a slap of wet clothes to keep up.

“UM,” she says once more, and snags Romani’s sleeve, but doesn’t try to slow him down — only keep them from getting separated. “ _What just happened!?_ ”

Mash’s shoulders are quivering, and her face is buried in Romani’s shoulder. He checks his pace, suddenly worried, but when Mash lifts her head she’s laughing, not crying, and wraps her arms around his neck to hold herself in his arms more comfortably. “It’s okay, Senpai. I think — I think King Gilgamesh was just trying to help.”

“ _That_ was _helping_?” Ritsuka demands, and then stops, her brain visibly rewinding, and Romani can almost see the moment she remembers the dirt-poor elder dragon Gilgamesh had them hunt. “Oh, yeah, that _would_ be the way Gilgamesh would try to help … but help _what_?”

“He said Enkidu mentioned a conversation they overhead this morning,” Mash explains, and there’s a part of Romani that groans for the fact that she’d heard that, _remembered_ it — but that part of him isn’t in control right now.

“A conversation —” Ritsuka cuts off suddenly, and when Romani slants his gaze sideways she looks sombre. “Oh. Okay. Yep.”

… She doesn’t let go of his sleeve, though. Despite himself, Romani becomes aware he’s almost smiling. Almost.

He stops smiling when she stumbles over her own feet with a violent shiver, and resists the urge to hasten. “Stay on your feet,” he murmurs, “we’re almost there.”

“Okay,” Ritsuka answers after a moment, and still doesn’t let go, as they make all speed toward the infirmary.


	12. And when it's over you'll breathe again

When they get to the infirmary none of the staff on duty are the ‘core’ group, the ones who’d been through hell and back — but they’ve summoned anyone on call, alerted by the klaxons and prepared for anything, if with the hesitant wondering of those who hadn’t had to actually meet those expectations.

Until Romani sweeps in, and someone sees his clothes first, and exclaims, turning to shout through the infirmary: “Gurney!”

“It’s fine,” he says shortly, and tries to modulate his tone. “I need a hypothermia kit, and we have a sprained ankle.” Even as he speaks, the staff scrambles. “Start prepping for two probable hypothermia cases immediately, and possible hypothermia cases across the facility for the foreseeable future, primarily mild.”

“What about you?” Ritsuka protests, in a flurry of activity; but Romani hasn’t stopped walking, heading for one of the nearest and well-heated exam rooms.

“I’m fine,” he says distractedly, and turns to — whoever’s at his other elbow. He knows her face, but in the moment he can’t remember her name — it hasn’t been _that_ long, how could he have forgotten names in a year? “The environmental systems are going to be wonky and we don’t know the extent yet. Be prepared for an influx of small issues — chills and colds, keep an eye out for frostbite. Make sure the kitchen knows to lean on the hot foods for a while, and have someone coordinate with inventory to make sure we have enough warm clothes and blankets to go around.”

“Understood.” She vanishes without hesitation, and Romani shepherds Ritsuka into the examination room. She’s definitely shivering by now, and rubbing her nose, and her skin looks a little blue.

“Get out of those clothes,” he orders Ritsuka as he lays Mash down on one of the tables, and halfway forgets that this, too, might be weird —

But Ritsuka moves away from sight-line through the door and starts peeling off her clothes without hesitation, though with a lot of fumbling, and Romani turns away. Another of the female nurses rushes in with a kit and arms full of blankets, and closes the door behind her. “We’ve nudged up the thermostat, and I have tea. Here’s the kit, Doctor.”

“Thank you,” Romani says absently. “Help Ritsuka get undressed. She needs drying off, blankets, tea, her temperature taken, a spare set of clothes. Mash, are your hands warm enough to undress?”

“Um …” Mash fumbles for the buttons of her jacket, and that’s enough of an answer. Romani closes his fingers around hers, taking a breath, and then another, and channelling warmth to his palms. “Oh! — Ow.”

“Sorry, sorry,” says Romani, but he doesn’t pull away, his intent on their hands. “Can you still feel your fingers?”

“Um — I c- can now.” She winces as the sensation starts coming back to them, wiggling them a little in his grip.

“Okay. Do you want me to leave the room while someone else helps you undress?”

Mash shakes her head in a fling of half-frozen droplets, and sniffles. “Nuh-uh.”

The bubble of warm, fond relief is a surprise, and it pops the hard tension Romani almost hadn’t noticed still in himself. He smiles at her, genuine if suddenly feeling tired. “Okay. Let me get one of the blankets for you, then. Ritsuka, are you wearing a blanket?”

“Mh huh.”

Okay. Good. Romani turns to get one to drape around Mash’s lap and over her shoulders while she undoes buttons and zips and anything else which she’d rather do on her own, and checks on Ritsuka.

She’s curled in one of the nearest chairs, a bundle of shivering blankets and poof of damp hair, with a red-tipped nose and a thermometer under her tongue while the nurse holds one in her ear. Her clothes are a sodden bundle on the other exam table. She narrows her eyes at Romani, but can’t air whatever thought she’s having while her mouth is full — probably a good thing, because Romani isn’t sure he’s gonna like it.

He fishes around for the thermometers for Mash, and when she abandons the attempt to undress herself in favour of pulling the blankets around her, shivering madly, Romani taps her mouth with the thermometer. Automatically she opens, holds it under her tongue, and for just a moment this feels familiar — familiar in a way that pangs Romani’s heart at the same time it warms his chest.

“Do you want the nurse to help you undress?” he asks again, more gently this time, and Mash shakes her head. “Okay.”

He can’t remember the last time he had to help Mash with her clothes. She had been ten by the time he became her doctor, ten and already used in Malisbury’s experiments — and boy howdy had Romani ripped into him about that. But she’d been very sick by then, and on her worst days he remembers sometimes she didn’t want to let go long enough to let him leave the room even if someone else was helping with her clothes …

The way she looks up at him, all trusting and open with the memory in her eyes also, makes Romani’s eyes sting suddenly.

It’s a silly thing to tear up about, but maybe it’s just as well, even with the blankets in the way. He’s as quick and gentle about it as he can be, peeling layers off under the blankets to throw them in the hamper. Her bad foot takes a little longer, owing to being careful about her ankle — he’ll need to take a closer look in a minute — but in short order Romani can put a dry blanket over her shoulders and swap it for the damp ones.

The last thing he does is use one of those to wrap around her head, tug her gently back against his chest, and dry her hair with a quick brisk rub as she squeaks and giggles. Romani smiles down into the blanket and pretends he isn’t as he whisks the blanket away.

“Okay. Uh —” He turns, realises he doesn’t rememberthis nurse’s name either — and she’s definitely giving him an odd look.

“Doctor Roman?” she asks, tentative and a little disbelieving, and Romani’s smile is automatic and wry at once.

“Uh, yes. I’m very sorry, I don’t —”

“Marks,” she says, equally automatically. “Eva Marks.”

— Yes. He remembers now. Eva Marks, been with Chaldea for a year — unusual because she’d been older than a lot of the staff, old enough not to be much perturbed by such a young chief medical officer, unlike some of the staff a decade off her age, and very, very knowledgeable …

And looking at him keenly, in a fashion that makes him feel distinctly uncomfortable.

“I remember,” he says, and he’s not smiling, not even a habitual cover — it feels weird. Solemn. Maybe it is. Eva is the first person he’s spoken to directly, who hadn’t been part of the Grand Order. “Eva, can you please take Mash’s axillary and tympanic temps while I see to her ankle? I don’t think we’ll need more accurate measurements; neither of them have lost consciousness, and Ritsuka has been ambulatory.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Eva says immediately, and motions at him. “What about you?”

"Yeah,” says Ritsuka pointedly over her thermos of tea, “what about _you_?”

“What about —” Romani begins in complete and honest bafflement, and then remembers he had, in fact, been _stabbed_ not all that long ago. He looks down at his stained clothes, remembers that they’re also still wet, and winces.

“I’ll, uh —” He can’t say it’s not his, because it is, but also it’s not a problem. “I’m not hurt, I’m okay. Um …”

“Mash’s ankle can wait a few minutes longer as long as she stays off it,” says Eva briskly. “Why don’t you get changed while I take Mash’s temps and get the girls into something other than blankets?”

Ritsuka grins at him wickedly past Eva’s arm, Mash giggles, and Romani throws up his arms. “Honestly, you’d think I wasn’t in charge around here.”

But he’s smiling as he says it, and Mash’s giggle trails after him as he snags some of the scrubs stored in every exam-room and steps through into the hall behind, toward the bathrooms.Thankfully that means he doesn’t have to horrify anyone in the main part of the infirmary.

It does mean he gets a good look at himself in the bathroom mirrors, and he winces, hissing through his teeth. His hair is a mess, to start with; he might have lost a braid, because of that sword. And the blood and wetness, and his skin looking pallid —

Yep. No wonder people had been alarmed. And these clothes are _probably_ a write-off … which is a pity, because Vlad had _just_ tailored them for him.

Romani plucks ruefully at the slash in his shirt. Oh, well. He’ll blame it on Gilgamesh, if he has to.

He undresses and it’s not until he’s trying to kick off his pants that he remembers the rose, mostly because it’s still twined around his ankle, the bud mostly-closed and nestled in the curve of his ankle-bone where it’s easy to miss. Just like that all the weight of everything the fight had suspended comes crashing down so hard that Romani has to grip the edge of the sink and take a few deep breaths.

This isn’t the same as despair; this isn’t something crushing his chest and leaving no room for anything else. This is something large and looming, something that doesn’t have to exist if it’s not looked at — but it’s there. Oh, it’s there.

Later, Romani promises himself. This time, _really_ , later. He needs to finish up with the girls first. He needs to make sure of what’s happening with the breach, and the environmental integrity of the facility.

But he stoops to touch the rose gently, to tap its stem where it’s wound stubbornly around ankle. “Please? I won’t throw you away.”

Grudgingly the rose unwinds and Romani lifts it to his hair — somewhere. He can feel the rose winding happily through one of the braids, like it had through Fou’s fur.

It’s already a mess, what’s a little more? The best he’s going to manage later is washing out the blood without unbraiding it. Da Vinci can’t be that far off the promised chair.

He gets dressed and looks better if only for not having blood on him. He’s going to need cleaning up sometime in the near future, but — later. Maybe he can combine it with the other ‘later’.

* * *

When Romani returns to the exam room, the girls are dressed in scrubs, sharing the same chair, sipping slowly on warm tea and looking already considerably better. Romani dumps his clothes in the hamper and turns to Eva.

Before he even needs to ask, she answers: “Average combined temperature of 34.4 degrees celsius for Ritsuka, 33.1 for Mash. They’ve already started lifting; I doubt there’s any need to worry, Doctor.”

Romani lets out a sigh of relief and leans against the exam table nearest to them, rubbing his forehead with the side of his fist. “That’s great.”

“And you were taking a little while so I looked over Mash’s ankle using Ottawa rules,” Eva adds, sounding suddenly a little distracted. “No x-rays necessary for ankle or foot, and if you like I can do up the recommendations for recuperation and therapy.”

Romani nods. “Thanks, Eva, that’d be great. Can you also do me a favour and go see if Da Vinci’s released any alerts about the environmentals?”

"Of course, Doctor.”

— She really is suddenly distracted, and when Romani looks she’s looking at his hands, at his arms, brown and crossed with frankly arcane tattoos.

She’d come from a magical family, Romani remembers belatedly, and self-consciously he crosses them so he can tuck his hands under his arms where they won’t be seen; and then he changes his mind and grips the edge of the exam table instead.

“If Da Vinci’s assessed the risk as minimal, you can tell everyone to ease off on the worst of the preparations. We’ll want to make sure everyone stays warm enough, but emergencies might be less likely.”

“I’ll have a look.”

She leaves and the _second_ the door is closed, Ritsuka asks: “Where did the blood come from?”

“Gilgamesh stabbed him,” Mash volunteers at once, before Romani can even _try_ to avoid answering, and Ritsuka makes a strangled noise. 

“ _Excuse you, he did what?”_

“Only a little,” says Romani weakly.

“It was not a _little_ , Doctor,” Mash objects, and Romani winces.

“Ah, okay, it was a _lot_ — but it’s okay, it’s gone now.” He lifts his shirt just enough to prove it, so they can see that part of his torso, unblemished save some of the blood he’d missed in his cursory clean in the bathrooms.

“How did you —” Ritsuka starts, and frowns. “Hey. You can heal yourself?! _Just like that_? What about Mash?!”

“Ah, well …” Romani smiles ruefully, letting his shirt drop. “I never really learned how to heal other people … but I had to know my own body very, very well. This one is — close enough.” Not totally the same, but good _enough_.

“Great!” says Ritsuka with a savage kind of cheer, the one she uses when she’s bullying herself into moving past something particularly difficult. “Now you can tell us about that conversation with Martha!”

Romani laughs briefly into his hand, shaking his head. “Ah, it was a little silly, now I’m thinking about it …”

Not all of it. He still doesn’t really want to be prayed over, or at least not to have to hear it happening. But the rest …

“She said you said it was embarrassing to be called a king,” Ritsuka persists, and Romani winces. “She caught me in the cafeteria to tell me about it, right before Sherlock came in for coffee and said I might be needed at the gym. I think she was a little worried.”

— Of _course_ it was Holmes. Romani can’t resist the eye-roll and the exasperated sigh, but swallows anything he might have said. Holmes had sort-of helped.

“Why would it be embarrassing to be called a king?” Mash wonders. “I mean — Doctor, you … you were.”

She sounds like she isn’t sure where the pains are, that she doesn’t want to hit; but it’s important enough to say. And she’s right: it is. Romani shakes his head ruefully, and doesn’t look over.

“Embarrassing was the wrong word,” he says, “but it’s sort-of getting there.” He waits a beat, glancing up past his brow to see whether they’ll let it go at that — but they don’t. They look at him expectantly, squished and comfortably close in the same chair, with the same blanket over both their shoulders. Romani huffs a fondly resigned breath. “It’s just that when people talk about me like I achieved a lot of great things, it feels … weird. Like I didn’t — do most of those things.”

“But you did,” says Mash, with quiet but brewing indignation, and Romani shakes his head.

“Did I? My clairvoyance spoke through me, most of the time. When I look back … mostly all I remember is doing what I was told. Just because what was giving me orders was greater than most other things doesn’t change that most of my achievements aren’t things I chose to do. So how can I claim credit for them? So, every time someone pays me respect for the things I did in my past life — I feel like an imposter.”

There’s a long moment of thoughtful silence, and Romani’s content to let it exist, gazing up at the ceiling. 

He’s not going to break down. It’s actually a surprise — that he doesn’t feel like he’s about to break down. The last couple of days it’s felt like that’s all he’s been doing.

“I understand,” Mash says finally, very soft. “I think I’d feel weird if anyone tried to tell me that I should take credit for things Galahad did.”

“I don’t think it’s the same thing,” says Ritsuka immediately. “You’re a different person than Galahad, Mash, but Doctor Roman isn’t. Are you?”

She sounds suddenly a little unsure, and Romani takes a moment to think without looking over. In the end he shakes his head. “No …” he says slowly, “I don’t think I am. Even reborn I had the same memories, and there was nothing new implanted — I just had a different context for them, and a different path in a different life.”

“Then why wouldn’t you be the one who takes credit for the things you did?” Ritsuka asks, sounding very reasonable, for a sixteen-year-old with far too much on her hands.

“Because it still wasn’t my choice to do them,” Romani answers simply and directly. “If I hadn’t been clairvoyant, would I still have done the same things? Would I still have built the temple, and raised Israel to prosperity?”

Ah, there’s those touches of surreality … he’d wondered when they’d arrive. But they’re less than they were. Still acute — just … easier to look at, and accept.

“If you hadn’t been clairvoyant, your asshole brother would have become king,” says Ritsuka grumblingly, and Romani can’t help the bark of laughter. “I’m serious! I read up on this! Half your family were complete and total —”

“ _Senpai_!” Mash cuts her off with strangled indignation, and this time Romani laughs softly and fondly.

“Well, they were,” Ritsuka muttered defensively, and Romani grins at her, very small.

“You’re probably right. Things would be very different if I hadn’t been king.”

“See?” Ritsuka points vindicatingly at him.

“And Gilgamesh is right,” Romani continues, making a face even as he does. “To everyone else, there was no clairvoyance, there was no greater power — well, not like the stories tell it, anyway. To them it really was just me. To try and pretend that I wasn’t at least the hand that drove most of those accomplishments would be — selfish and futile. No one else saw what happened behind it.”

It feels a bit lonely and a lot burdensome to think of it that way; to try and imagine it from everyone else’s perspective, to have this silly man who’d done so much try to insist that he hadn’t … yeah. He can see why Martha was worried.

“Maybe that’s the point,” Mash suggests tentatively, slow as if in thought. “I mean — maybe that’s why it was you. Most people, when they get told to do something, they kind of … resent it a bit, don’t they?”

“Yep,” Ritsuka agrees with an emphatic nod. “Yep, we really, really do.”

“So … maybe what was needed was someone who was kind and gentle and patient enough to put aside their own desires for a while, to make sure human history had a chance,” says Mash. “Because — having magic has been really important, hasn’t it? Imagine if we hadn’t had it …”

They spent a silent moment or three, trying to contemplate the lack of magic daily. Romani — well, can’t; but there’s magic and there’s _magic_ , and he’s not sure they’re talking about the same thing. The purely physical presence of that kind of power — well, he’s not convinced it would have changed much, if people couldn’t be mages.

But the ability for humanity to empower itself and make its own choices … it wouldn’t have lasted long, without that.

But that’s probably not what the girls are thinking of.

“You ended the Age of Gods, didn’t you?” says Ritsuka softly. “If you hadn’t, there’s no telling what humanity might have become. We really needed to take control of our own power, if we wanted to create something lasting.”

For a moment Romani can’t answer; his chest is too full of warmth and something complicatedly ambivalent, something fond and exasperated. Right as he was thinking they probably weren’t thinking the same way …! He keeps not giving them enough credit.

“I think so too, Senpai,” says Mash. “I think — I think humanity really needed someone who was willing to give that much. I think it was you because you were the only one who _could_ , Doctor. So — don’t talk about being an imposter. Goetia tried to pretend he was you, but even if Goetia is how humanity came to have magic, they would never have done it if it weren’t for you. It isn’t being an imposter to take credit for something that wouldn’t have happened if you had never existed.”

And now Romani _can’t_ answer. His chest is full and warm and it seems to be encroaching on his throat, so that when he takes a breath to try and speak, there’s just no room for anything else. His eyes are wet, again, but his cheeks also hurt from smiling, and in the end he just shakes his head helplessly toward the ceiling, letting out a breath of a laugh, because he doesn’t have anything else.

“Oh, good, it looks like I don’t have to do anything,” says Da Vinci cheerfully from the doorway. “Thank you, Mash.”

Um …” Mash’s cheeks go pink. “I — I would have said it anyway …”

“Yes, and now I don’t have to.” Da Vinci’s heels click on the floor as she enters, looking over the three of them with a critical eye, and sighs when she sees Romani. “Your hair is a _mess_. Ah, good thing I should be finished with that chair by tomorrow. We’ll be able to wash it in the morning, and cut it in the afternoon. Unless you’ve changed your mind in the last few hours …?”

She trails off and Romani is aware of the hopeful looks the girls are giving him, but even with his face aching for smiling, he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I want it cut. I want it shorter than this — this mess.”

He tugs resignedly at one of the braids.

“Ah, too bad,” Da Vinci sighs, and hops up on the exam table beside him to kick her feet. “Well, everything that can be done has now been done. I’ve alerted the rest of the facility, and judging by the activity outside, the infirmary is well prepared for anything the environment might dump on us, and someone’s already been down to inventory to start distributing as many blankets as we have available to the non-Heroic-Spirits on the staff. Someone’s even been to the kitchen to tell Emiya to make hot meals for the foreseeable future.” Her elbow digging into his side is not quite sharp enough to make Romani squeak. “I think that just about wraps everything up. Which means that you —” She pokes him hard in the scalp.

“Ow!”

“— can go and shower and at least get that blood out of your hair. You’ve sent the infirmary staff into a tizzy, you know. When I came in one of them was trying to convince the others you’re you, and a couple of the others were insisting you’re a Heroic Spirit.”

“Well, none of them are wrong,” says Ritsuka cheerfully, “except for how he kind of isn’t a Heroic Spirit anymore.”

Romani rubs his head ruefully. “Ah, Eva was a good help … I hope I didn’t alarm her too much. But, fine, I’ll go and get cleaned up a little better, happy?”

He levers himself off the exam table, but before he can get far, Mash interrupts. 

“Um, Doctor,” she begins. “Um, about — about Merlin —”

… Oh.

Romani’s smile doesn’t freeze, but it does fade a little. Not totally, but a little. “Ah, thank you, Mash,” he says softly, “but I don’t want to talk about that right now. Ask me again another time, okay?”

“… Okay.” She nods, gazing worriedly up at him, and Romani knows she’s looking for a reaction, for — something brittle, probably, something that’s him falling apart. It’s weird that he doesn’t feel like he _will_ ; so he leans down to muss her hair a little until she squeaks, and then pulls away grinning to head toward the door.

“I’m expecting you for dinner, Romani!” Da Vinci calls as he exits, and he waves to show he’s at least _heard_ , if not consenting; and behind him he hears Ritsuka demanding to know _what_ about Merlin, before he gets too far away.

* * *

The infirmary is less of a fluster now, though there’s still more people on staff than would usually be on shift — even accounting for the fact they aren’t limited to a skeleton crew. Eva is by the desk, so Romani goes there first, and she looks up from her furious, hurried whisper with one of the other nurses.

“Ah, Doctor Roman. Da Vinci just went to find you —”

“She found me,” agrees Romani, ignoring the stares he’s getting from the other staff — some blatant, some at least trying to be subtle. “She didn’t have a chance to tell me much, though.”

He’d maybe forgotten to ask …

Eva doesn’t call him on it.

“The system’s been calibrated to account for heat at that end of the facility,” she says, “but because of the power tax the heat will be lowered until repairs have been made, and there may be some rolling blackouts in unused areas of the facility.”

That means they’ll be bringing people into the core areas as much as they can, again … Romani nods, a little distracted by thought. “Have someone get together the orientation pamphlets about the environmental hazards of the facility’s location. I expect most people will need a reminder how to approach the situation. And we should still have that slideshow about the worst-case scenarios, if the geothermal system goes down … have someone dig them up and start arranging some training sessions. I doubt things will get any worse, but if they do, we want everyone to be prepared.”

“Understood, Doctor.”

“I’ll be back in about an hour to coordinate a little more,” he says, and plucks at his scrubs with a wry half-laugh. “I need some other clothes … and Da Vinci’s informed me I have blood in my hair.”

Eva smiles a little, half amused half something else — rattled, disbelieving? Romani isn’t sure. Once upon a time, he’d have known.

He doesn’t mind not knowing.

“You do,” she agrees. “In an hour I’ll also have some shift preferences from the staff.”

“Good call.” They might need to double-shift, if there’s too much risk of a medical emergency while the environmental system’s down. “Thanks, Eva.” Romani waggles his fingers at the other nurse and turns to leave.

He’s not quite to the door when he hears Eva whisper: “See?”

“But he doesn’t look anything like Doctor Roman …”

Romani really doesn’t expect the small quiet laugh bubbling in his chest, but at least he manages to contain it until he’s out of the infirmary and away from casual observation.

He goes to his room. An hour might be too much time — he’s probably going to be back sooner than that. Probably. He’s acutely aware that ‘later’ might be becoming ‘now’, and that fact becomes more obvious when he reaches his room and leans against the door and takes a deep bracing breath.

His room’s empty this time, at least of people; but he’s aware of the lump against his scalp that is the rose’s blunted thorns.

Yes. Later will have to be now.

… Or in a few minutes, once he’s got into the shower.

Romani has to be careful with the scrubs, working the shirt over his hair and still not quite managing to get it off without something being caught. He’s pretty sure he can feel loose hair stuck against the back of his neck … Gilgamesh _did_ take off one of his braids, didn’t he? He’d better not have made Da Vinci’s hair-cutting job more difficult …

It’s an inane thought and Romani knows it is even as he thinks it, knows it’s an attempt to distract himself from that looming Later until he’s stripped and in the shower, until his hair has been if not unbound then at least had the blood washed out of the braids that have it.

His fingers catch on the rose’s stem and, quite suddenly, Romani finds himself staring that Later in the face, in the form of a great twist in his chest which is neither despair nor grief, but something bubbling and nebulous like static. Something that could be lightning, but isn’t … yet.

_“It was not Da Vinci who slipped through dreams to gather your stardust …”_

Romani coaxes the rose out of his hair, pretending he doesn’t have tears in his eyes; and then he cradles it in his hands and leans his forehead against the wall, so the shower pounds down his back and he can sort-of pretend he’s not _really_ breaking apart …

At least he’s doing it in private.

If he were doing it.

Merlin was the one who went looking for him.

 _Merlin_. It was Merlin who’d brought him back, it was Merlin who’s made the rose, it was Merlin who —

_“Are there any other options?”_

_“Just one.”_

— why would _Merlin_ …?

“Ah, you know why,” Romani whispers against the wall, to the rose in his hands, still a bud with only a couple of outside petals daring yet to unfold. “You know why this is so hard, Romani …”

The reason he’d avoided looking at this rose, not because Merlin might have helped —

But because Merlin already had, and Romani hadn’t known it.

Because Magi*Mari —

_Heeeey_ _@archromance I noticed you answering some questions around the forum and just wanted to say thanks :D :D :D :D :D :D_

Because the idol who could not possibly exist after the incineration of humanity … he’d known no one could exist, he’d _known_ it, but he’d still willingly ignored that truth, still made himself believe that Magi*Mari could genuinely be real.

And the thought that someone who could be an anchor, who had — spoken to him, encouraged him, consoled him, sometimes been the only thing which gave Romani the will to keep going …

_im scared. im really really scared. i dont think_ _i can_ _do this_

_I believe in you, Romani._

… had been someone else entirely.

Having to face that, to confront the fact he might have — affection for — someone who doesn’t even exist, because all along it’d been a reprobate half-demon fooling around in history, gleefully manipulating Romani the way he’d manipulated a young girl with passion in her eyes —

_Romani. Tell them._

_i cant. theyll hate me._

_They won’t hate you. Tell them, Romani. I promise it will be okay._

_i cant._

Looking at that truth in the eye would have meant breaking his own heart. Even now the thought makes Romani’s chest twist and brings a hard lump to his throat, makes tears spill over with panic and betrayal, even secondhand, even not having occurred. Just the risk is enough.

But.

 _But_.

_“Do you think a modern technical genius could bring you back from the brink of death?”_

But if what Gilgamesh said was true, then Merlin hadn’t _just_ been fooling around in history.

If what Gilgamesh said was true, then — maybe — and Romani barely even dare to think it, in this wet tiled stall of a shower, all alone with a rose in his hands — but _maybe_ —

Maybe Romani had touched Merlin’s heart the way Magi*Mari — the way _Merlin_ — had touched his.

And if that was true, then …

This the part Romani doesn’t know how to sidle around, this great swell of possibility, something so far out of his realm of experience that looking at it makes his heart flutter for panic and potential.

It’s too big. It’s so big, it — Romani doesn’t know what to do with it, trying to put those thoughts together. It’s like he’d been expecting to have nothing but ashes in his hands and suddenly it’s a mountain. 

But: it’s there.

He can see it, in a way that has nothing to do with clairvoyance.

He can look at it, and those two possibilities reaching toward each other from different directions, and he can feel the weight of their potential meeting.

He doesn’t need to put them together. Not yet, not now. Just looking at them feels like he’s scraped a layer of skin off his back.

… Or that might be because the _water’s freezing and he hadn’t noticed!_

Romani’s laugh is a twisted but genuine thing as he finally stirs to shift out of the stream of frigid water, shivering and fumbling for the tap to turn it off.

Oh, boy. Oh, this is going to be fun, with all the heating going in and out like this … well, at least Da Vinci and the other tech-minded Servants will have plenty to do.

And so will Romani. Right now, he’s just — going to put down the things he’s been looking at. They’re waiting for him at the infirmary, and that — that is something he _can_ do, right now.


	13. Let me be the one you call

The rest of the afternoon passes relatively smoothly. Romani hadn’t quite known what to expect when he got back, more properly dressed but still lacking his favoured coat (darn it!), and at least not looking like a half-frigid cat.

He can feel weariness waiting in the wings, though. Not massively; he’s not about to fall over in the course of the afternoon. But he’s aware that he’s used magic, a _lot_ , in the space of a very short time, and his magical circuits aren’t … actually used to being used without the rings bolstering them.

In the meantime, his hands can suffer being a little cold. It’s his own fault for standing under frigid water for so long.

Mash and Ritsuka have been released, ordered back to their rooms, and Romani checks Mash’s recuperation chart with some satisfied relief. Of all the people who’d been here the whole time, trained medical staff had been few. Having people nearby who actually know what they’re doing and aren’t mad scientists or Berserkers is more of a relief than he expected.

He’ll check up on Mash when he gets a break — and she’d better be sleeping when he does.

One or two people have already presented at the infirmary with chills, but the staff has that well in hand. Romani gathers up the shift schedule, the notes Eva had taken, and a myriad of other things and takes them into his office so he can figure out who’s doing what, when, and how they need to coordinate with Da Vinci’s technical division. They’re the ones who are going to be at greatest risk: he really can’t remember how good that wall he created is, though he remembers wanting it to be _solid_. If he put it in the wrong place they might need to break it down, and that means outside work, and that means significant risk of injury or illness …

It’s still a far cry from a dozen people in support and a teenager sent out into Singularities. Sending out a dozen emails has never felt so domestic and surreal at once. It’s like he’s gone back to before the Grand Order.

Except — everything he does is tinged with the reality of ungloved hands. He doesn’t notice it, most of the time; he notices skin and tattoos first. But every now and then, over the course of the afternoon, being in this place without gloves — it hits him that he isn’t hiding.

No one asks. He gets a lot of stares, a lot of side-eyeing, and he knows they’re whispering outside his door; but no one, even Eva, asks. Romani feels a little guilty that he’s so glad about that, but guilt gives way to … everything else. He’s not sure who had seen, who hadn’t … he’ll need to check with Da Vinci.

In the back of his head, that what-if lingers, and every time it reminds him it’s there his stomach flips over with butterflies. It’s not entirely comfortable, and he can’t seem to stop it.

If it’s true … what if.

The unknown future has never been so aggravatingly torn between anticipation and terror. And Romani doesn’t know which way to fall — he needs more data.

He knows where to get it, too.

That evening he actually leaves the infirmary at a decent time, heading back to his room to deposit some of the materials he still needs to review and then stopping for a moment to look in the mirror and take some deep breaths.

Dinner with Da Vinci. Should he get changed? Is this some kind of welcome-back kind of dinner, or a browbeating dinner?

… He’s just going wear what he’s wearing now, and she can deal. He has some questions to ask. Romani’s pretty sure she’ll be more focused on those.

— Questions.

Oh. Crap. What if Merlin’s been _watching_?

Romani’s heart skips a beat and plunges into his gut, and he reaches up to his hair, where the rose has been nestled all afternoon — mostly invisible. It lets itself be drawn out of its braid without resistance this time, and when Romani cups it in his palms its stem lengths and twines around his wrist. Romani can’t help but smile, and then tries to pretend he didn’t; and he lifts it up to whisper at it closely, feeling a little silly but also — justified.

There’s no telling who might be listening, and this is — this is something he can barely stand to look at in his own heart, let alone imply out loud.

“If he’s watching,” he starts, and then clears his throat to start again. “If he’s watching — let him think nothing of this. Let him think that … there’s nothing about this conversation that’s worth paying attention to. Can you do that?”

The rose continues to grow, slow and sure, and all of a sudden the closed bud blooms, vivid red and silken, and its petals gently brush his lips until Romani is blushing furiously for having been seduced by a _rose_.

“Ah … th- thank you …”

… He maybe won’t keep it in his hair, this time. It takes up so much room while it’s bloomed, and that seems more, um, on display than he wants to be right now.

He lets it twine around his wrist instead, the open blossom nestled on the back of his hand, and then leaves to go to the cafeteria to pick up some food. No doubt Da Vinci had meant they’ll be eating in there — but this is a conversation he really doesn’t want to be overheard by _anyone_.

That, and Romani suspects it’ll involve Chaldea’s security stream.

He has a suspicion also that he’s going to owe Da Vinci for some of this … maybe he can try his hand at making some shortcake. It’s been a long time.

When Romani gets to Da Vinci’s workshop and knocks on the door, balancing the tray on his other hand, Da Vinci is elbows-deep in some contraption or another.

“Ah, Romani,” she says cheerfully, but with shades of surprise as she darts a glance to the many, many clocks on the wall, not all of them set to the same time. “Hmmm, honestly, I was expecting you to be late to the cafeteria … you’ve always had trouble being on time. Give me a few minutes to finish up.”

Romani’s smile falters as he comes in to let the door hiss shut. “Ah, Leonardo … you realise that the reason I was always late for important meetings is because I was expecting a bomb to go off, right?”

He hadn’t known who and he hadn’t known when — but he’d known _how_ , always, and always been prepared; always tried to ensure that, no matter when, he would be around in the aftermath to solve what was happening. Without clairvoyance, it had been the best he could do. Especially after Malisbury …

Ah, but he’d always known the price. Lazy, late, layabout genius Romani Archaman.

She pauses in the middle of reaching for a spanner and blinks at him with sudden disconcert. He can practically see the breath that would bring with it light-hearted dissembling, and the choice halfway through that swallows it.

“Actually,” she says, picking up the spanner, “I hadn’t. But now I know. Hm.” She frowns down into her equipment. “This ‘blaming everything on you’ urge is really rather rude, isn’t it? I’ll keep a lid on those remarks in future, don’t worry.”

Romani exhales and relief is a quiet but trembling thing suffusing his limbs. Just as well he’s close enough to put the tray down, with its burdens of fancy dishes, covered to keep in the heat. “Thank you.”

Da Vinci flaps her hand at him. “Like I said: _rude_. I’ll have no part in that. Hand me that screwdriver, will you?”

Romani hands her the screwdriver and leans back against the table to lift his face to the ceiling, to see what’s changed in the painting. Last time he’d been here, it had been a starscape, a galaxy of Singularities and planets.

Now it seems to be something else — a medley of people around a kaleidoscope of a sun.

… It looks like a hole in the ceiling has been filled by warmth, and suddenly Romani’s eyes are stinging.

Da Vinci hums, and there’s a clank. “There. Done. Now, what did you want to talk about, Romani? I assume that’s why you came here instead of waiting for me in the cafeteria.”

Romani drags his gaze down and grins reluctantly at her. “Ah, you miss nothing, do you?”

“Not in the least,” she says cheerfully, setting down her tools and pulling off her glove, and pulling up chairs for them both. The food is too good to be served on a tray like this — but it’s not the first time they’ve both eaten gathered around Da Vinci’s workshop desk, in the quiet where they can, for a little while, take some time to be peers and not commanders.

Romani takes a deep breath, setting out the plates and cutlery for them both. “I want to ask you about Merlin.”

Her gaze flickers to the rose on his wrist, too full in bloom to really be hidden by his sleeve. Maybe he should have put it in his hair after all; like this, it looks too much like a corsage.

“Mash told me that Gilgamesh told you,” Da Vinci says, and sighs. “Speaking of rude. I’d been hoping to ease you into that part.”

Romani smiles a little, shakes his head. “Gilgamesh helped me make a choice I hadn’t known I was avoiding — a choice I probably wouldn’t have ever realised I was avoiding, without that kind of intervention.”

“He impaled you to a _wall_ ,” Da Vinci reminds him dryly, lifting the lid to find sauce and steaks, and ladle them onto their plates.

Romani winces, not looking up from the steamed veggies he’s likewise portioning. Oh, Mash had to mention that, didn’t she?

“I know, I know … but the truth hurts. And now that it’s over, I feel — better than I did.”

“Hmmm.” She looks at him calculatingly, spooning out garlic beans onto their plates. “You do seem much more settled than you were yesterday. It’s almost alarming.”

“It almost is, huh?” Romani’s smile is wry. “Ah, he illuminated some things, really.”

“I wouldn’t have imagined Gilgamesh could be _considerate_ ,” Da Vinci mutters, and Romani laughs; he can’t help it. He remembers saying the same thing, once. “He’s always known, hasn’t he?”

"Always,” Romani admits. “But I don’t think this was him being considerate. I think this was him paying a debt.”

_“If death always follows, what is the point? Where shall I go? What of Gilgamesh?”_

_“Rise, King of Heroes. Return to your people. The far-away, for you, is for now too far. Though you may cross the waters of death, a man is not forgotten as long as his name is spoken. Though Uruk will fall, though your body rot, the name Gilgamesh will be remembered for as long as human history exists.”_

Da Vinci looks at Romani speculatively and he smiles and shrugs, and doesn’t answer her unspoken question.

“Hmmmm.” She draws out the sound, eyes narrowed, and sets down the emptied dishes in a stack on the tray, and picks up her utensils. “I’ll let that slide this time, Archaman. What did you want to know about Merlin?”

“What he did,” says Romani, and inexplicably his throat tightens. He clears it. “What he did, when it started — everything.”

“Ah, well, _that_ , I can do,” says Da Vinci cheerfully, and picks up her plate, beckoning him over to her computer. “In that case, it starts with this entirely-too-obvious email he sent me some time ago …”

* * *

She shows him the emails. She shows him the IMs. She tells him of the dream conversation, the very rude door-turned-tree. She tells him of the coffin in which he’d woken, set aside to let his life brew. She tells him about the dreams, and the building humidity in that precious container, and the incense that had filled the command-room.

She shows him the video footage of Chaldea, when they find the Singularity, of Merlin all neon pink and ethereal; of Merlin cheerfully sitting in objects, pretending at lack of care despite that, every now and then, his face draws sombre and his eyes distant as if to view something not there.

In some of those moments, there’s some revelations — fleeting expressions that Romani would miss if he weren’t watching oh so very closely. Irritation. Exasperation. Smugness. Relief.

Does Merlin even know how much his face shows?

… Maybe not. He’s been locked in his tower all this time, after all.

There’s a period they can’t view. The video whites out with screaming snow on a thunderclap of a name, and Romani winces. “Ah, sorry, I really didn’t think about what that might do to Chaldea …”

“Oh, well, David handled it pretty well,” says Da Vinci cheerfully, and shoots him a sideways look. “Though if you have any ideas why the FATE system showed we summoned King Hassan for a moment there …”

Romani thinks of slowly revolving faces on a bed of wings, and shakes his head.

“You’re a terrible liar, Romani.”

But she doesn’t press, and only continues spinning the video on. Their dinner is long eaten by the time they get to the moment Romani wants to see the most, though he doesn’t quite realised he does until they get there.

He watches in silence as the coffin glows, watches those in the command-room shouting panic and determination back and forth. Confirming existence, existence hanging …

He sees the moment Merlin gathers himself up and launches toward the coffin, _into_ the coffin; the sparking bloom of light around every seam, the way it curls around the coffin like a fast-blooming rosebush.

_“Are there any other options?”_

_“Just one.”_

The way Merlin’s pink semi-transparent body flings out of the coffin as if he’s yanked hard on something that gave too easily looks really very painful. They both wince at it; and then the coffin’s light settles and someone shrieks that they _have him_ —

Da Vinci taps the video to pause and leans against the desk. “And there you have it. You know the rest.”

Romani finds his throat too full to immediately speak, and his eyes are damp again but none of the tears have fallen. His face feels kind of stretched, though …

Da Vinci pokes his cheek. “Ah, I don’t think I’ve _ever_ seen you smile like that, you know. You’ve always used them to cover up. This one’s almost painful to look at.”

“Ah, is it that bad?” Automatically Romani lifts a hand to touch his mouth, as if he can tell. He realises belatedly it’s the one with the rose on it, when the bloom quivers and leans toward him. Romani’s cheeks warm and he lowers his hand again, very quickly.

“Not _bad_ ,” says Da Vinci thoughtfully. “Just very raw and open. Romani.” She sobers, looking at him very seriously, very keenly. “Think a little about this, okay? Even if there’s feelings happening — and there are definitely feelings happening, no matter what Merlin says — feelings alone can’t make a relationship happen.”

“You’re giving me romantic advice?”

“I’m giving you best friend advice,” says Da Vinci. “He lied to you. And for good reason! But Magi*Mari was built to be loved. Everything about her that’s lovable might not be the same things about Merlin that are.”

_i dont know if_ _i can_ _do this_

_I believe in you, Romani._

“The Magi*Mari I talked to wasn’t just an idol on a screen,” Romani says softly.

“That might be true,” says Da Vinci, “but it still doesn’t mean she was completely Merlin. He peeked, you know — he would have made sure Magi*Mari was exactly what you needed. That doesn’t mean you know _him_. And it definitely means he’s hidden all the things that will probably annoy you.”

“I was watching in Babylonia.”

He was. He’d been irritated by Merlin, a lot — but not always for the same reasons. His constant insistence that demons can’t feel anything is frankly a joke, and more than once Romani had had to bite his tongue hard so as not to say something stupid where the girls would hear it. Honestly —

None of this would have happened, if demons were incapable of feeling … if the 72 had been incapable of feeling.

Demons can feel perfectly fine. It’s the fact that they can usually only feel one thing to the exclusion of all else that’s the problem.

Once upon a time he’d mused about fixing that …

Romani shakes his head. Merlin’s half-human. A human heart makes a lot of difference.

“Mhm.” Da Vinci’s still watching him keenly. “Now imagine that, but closer! In your room!”

Despite himself, Romani laughs, even as his cheeks warm further. “Ah, Da Vinci … you know, a lot of the reason he irritated me is because I was jealous?”

“Oh?”

“Mhm.” Romani looks at the screen, at the wobbly pink transcalent blob that is Merlin flung halfway through a bank of computers, and shakes his head. “He’s probably the most venerated mage of all time —”

“Oh, really?”

“I didn’t say he was the _best-known_ mage of all time,” says Romani, with dignity, “although you could argue it — I’m known in different circles and not all of them know me as a mage, that’s all.”

“I’ll accept your definition, for the purposes of this conversation.”

Ah, this is familiar, and soothing, and Romani’s smile is small and unbidden. “The fact is — whatever he did, however he did it, whether those choices were wrong or right … he’s known because of the choices _he_ made.”

“And you weren’t,” says Da Vinci.

“It doesn’t feel like it, no. So … yeah. I’ve been jealous of him. I _am_ jealous of him. The whole world knows his name, because he’s the one who made it what it is, for better or worse.”

“Ah, Romani,” Da Vinci sighs, and levers off the desk to wrap her arms around him and rest her head against his shoulder from behind. “You silly, silly man.”

“I’m not forgetting what Mash said earlier,” Romani grumbles. “I’m just saying.”

“Don’t you think some jealousy is going to get in the way?”

“I don’t know.”

“And, of course, there’s the fact that you don’t really know him, and he knows you very well …”

“I know.”

“It’s very unbalanced, is all.”

“Yep.”

“And there’s another thing,” she continues, speaking to the side instead of into his ear. “Magi*Mari was a woman. Merlin is a man. Had you considered that?”

… Romani had not actually considered that, or not gotten that far. The blush returns, in full force, and he clears his throat. “I hadn’t, actually, uh …”

“Well, it’s something to think about,” says Da Vinci cheerfully. “It wouldn’t exactly be fair going into anything asking Merlin to be something he’s not, after all.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“Then you’d better decide what it is you _want_ out of this, hadn’t you?”

Romani nods, still looking at the silent, frozen screen, still showing the grainy-staticky glow of the coffin and Merlin’s half-there shape. “Yeah. I think I’d better.”

As if he’s decided there _is_ going to be something.

As if he knows that something will happen.

“Good.” Da Vinci squeezes him around the shoulders and withdraws to go back to her worktable, pointing imperiously at the empty dishes stacked on the tray. “Don’t forget to take that back to the kitchen. Oh, and try to get some sleep, will you? I’ve made sure the infirmary knows not to expect you tomorrow morning. I should be done with your chair by then, and we can finally deal with your hair. Unless, of course, you’ve changed your mind …?”

She peeks hopefully at him as he picks up the tray, and Romani shakes his head laughing. “Ah, no. I still want to get it cut. I think more people might recognise me, then.”

Da Vinci pouts. “Pity. Ah, well; it would have been a waste of the research I had Ritsuka do about donating hair for wigs. And don’t forget to think about those things we just talked about.”

“I won’t,” says Romani, smiling without even needing to think about it, and making for the exit. “Good night, Leonardo.”

“Good night, Romani.”


	14. If you jump, I'll break your fall

Romani does actually try to sleep, once he’s delivered the dishes to the kitchen and made his way back to his room. He gets changed into something comfortable, he makes sure his braids are out of the way, he ensures the rose has plenty of fresh water in its glass by his bed, he resists the urge to look at his screens, he turns the lights down low … everything.

It’s just that sleep doesn’t come. He tosses and turns, his mind abuzz and refusing to settle. He’d really meant to sleep on all this, and consider things over time, but apparently that’s just not going to happen!

With a sigh he finally rolls to flumph on his back, gazing up at the ceiling and giving in to the fluttering butterflies in his stomach.

Da Vinci’s right. She’s right about most things, but she’s especially right about this. Merlin knows Romani, but Romani doesn’t know Merlin back — not really. Everything that had made his conversations with Magi*Mari special had been, at best, constructs intended to keep him reassured, to keep his spirits up and direct him toward the goal of stopping Goetia.

… Actually, thinking about it in those terms, Romani feels a little miffed that Merlin had seen fit to fool around with things like that — as if Romani hadn’t known what to do!

Ah, but he might have failed, if not for that help. With every Servant hearing his voice and declaiming him, with Mash’s heart doubting, and Ritsuka unintentionally echoing their assessments … sometimes Magi*Mari had seemed to be the only one who had any faith in him at all, or even cared that he might be hurt by such accusations.

_they keep saying such horrible things and the worst thing is that i dont know that theyre wrong_

_Well, they’re certainly not seeing the whole picture, are they?_

Some days, Magi*Mari had been the only thing keeping him going. Romani presses his hands to his face and colours in shame as he remembers how many times he’d interrupted a conversation to ‘consult’ his idol … how _embarrassing_.

But he also remembers, in those moments, the searing edge of panic and the knowledge that he was on a cliff’s edge, and reaching for the one thing which had seemed stable in amongst everything else. Without clairvoyance, without the voice telling him what to do and reassuring him of the right path, Magi*Mari had seemed like a God-send.

It’s pretty terrible to realise that Romani had replaced one kind of master for another …

He’d known it, too, every time he turned to his laptop, to his chat-screen. He’d known, in action, that this kind of secondhand advice was hardly even the indomitable clairvoyance he’d possessed. But, at the time, it had been a life-rope.

And it had been Merlin.

Trying to transfer from one to the other still feels like his brain has missed a step coming down a stairwell. The idea that the happy, earnest woman who spammed emotes was, on the other side, a half-demon locked in a tower …

It makes Romani’s brain hurt, a little.

But it explains how Magi*Mari had always known what to say, how to advise, even when Romani had ignored her advice for fear. How often had Merlin spent watching him, anyhow?

Very often. It had to be very often. There were very few times Magi*Mari said anything wrong, or which Romani didn’t listen to.

_Romani, tell them._

_theyll hate me_

_They won’t hate you. It’ll be okay. I promise._

_i cant_

“Ah, you’re a little pathetic, Archaman, you know that?” he murmurs to himself, into his hands. He does know that.

Right, right. Da Vinci’s concerns. Well, firstly, the fact that Romani doesn’t really know Merlin at all — there’s only one way to fix that, isn’t there? Romani had spoken to Magi*Mari over IM services and in forum messages. There’s no reason for Merlin to have shut down Magi*Mari, or he surely wouldn’t have done it so fast and sudden, so most likely Romani should be able to use those avenues to — talk to him. Again. Some more.

This time, knowing full well who he is.

The thought makes Romani’s heart leap and thud, and he’s not sure what to do with that. It’s a terrifying thought. It’s a liberating thought. There’s — literally nothing stopping him from doing that, is there …?

Okay. That’s one thing solved. He’ll check in the morning whether his accounts are still up, or if they’ve expired. Merlin better not have tossed them, that’s all Romani’s saying.

But that consideration is barely a surface one. Really, the thing to ask there is — what if Romani doesn’t actually _like_ Merlin? What if, after all that, the person Romani might — love — doesn’t actually exist? Could Romani make that change?

Can he imagine Merlin, instead of Magi*Mari?

His brain goes in circles for who-knows-how long before Romani finally lets out a frustrated noise and rolls out of bed. He doesn’t turn on the lights, just fumbles for his chair and his laptop, and boots it up. Just to the lockscreen — he doesn’t intend to do any of this _now_ — and his lockscreen is his desktop, which is Magi*Mari.

… It’s a little embarrassing to know that anyone looking at his laptop thinks he’s a giant nerd for having pictures of a celebrity idol on his lockscreen …

It’s even more surreal to know that she doesn’t exist.

This one is a special one, anyway. It’s not a generic media release. It’s something she’d sent to him herself, all smiles and encouragement, and effusive use of stars and sparkles. A doctored picture, but in the cutest way, and just for him.

… That might have been the moment he’d fallen a little more in love than just infatuation, come to think of it …

And the picture is even more a construct than he’d known. Merlin had made it — tailored it — for him alone. And now Romani studies it, picking out the parts that he’s pretty sure he can attribute to Merlin. Vibrant pink hair, cut short around the shoulders, isn’t Merlin — but there’s a texture and fluff to it which Romani remembers from Merlin’s real hair. Something about the impish gleam in her eyes, and maybe the cheekbones too …

Romani turns his head, imagines hard that this is Merlin he’s looking at, _Merlin_ who’s sending him encouraging messages almost every day —

It feels weird. Makes him blush and he’s not sure why, and it feels a little like he’s stepping onto endangered territory, here, trying to imagine a real person … Well. He’d thought Mari was a real person.

This is different. This is layers and layers of dreams and hopes laid bare for a reality which is far more grounded, just as sparkly, and a lot more terrifying.

But —

But. When Romani looks at that picture, tries to imagine Merlin sending those encouraging little messages, sprawled on the stone floor of the tower, surrounded by flowers …

He can imagine it. He can.

And it doesn’t make him feel as terrible as he thought it would. Weird, yes, but — like something ill-fitting. Something that maybe needs a little while to rest.

So, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Romani sets that aside, at least for now, and moves on to Da Vinci’s next point: Merlin has very definitely aired a preference for gender. He could, after all, simply make himself a woman, if he wants to be a woman, but he doesn’t; so, probably he prefers the sex-and-or-gender he was born with. Which is not the one Romani usually thinks about, and definitely doesn’t match Magi*Mari’s.

Romani’s fantasised about Magi*Mari, of course … more often before she’d contacted him directly. The one time he remembers dreaming about her like that had been — his cheeks burn — had been that time Gilgamesh and Merlin had conspired to get him a day off and sent him to sleep. Had that been Merlin, in that dream? Had it been him who —

The thought makes Romani’s heart beat loud and adrenaline rush through him, and he takes a slow deep breath and lets it out slowly, and the nervousness with it. Not what he’s thinking about right now. Something to talk about, definitely, but it’s only going to make him think in circles about it until he can talk to _Merlin_.

At any rate, aside from — that — Romani had realised very quickly that his experience with sex had been mostly in the context of political marriages and making babies, and not much else. Most days, when he fantasised about being with Magi*Mari, it had been — small things. Domestics. Sitting at a coffee-shop. Being able to give her his coat on a cold winter in London. Talking to her — one-on-one — asking about her hopes and her dreams and her belief in the future, knowing what she thought about where the world was going, and how they could make it better, what actions people could take …

And then it had happened. Not in a coffee-shop, nowhere near being in the same physical location — but a lot of their conversations had been … well, that.

Ah, she’d reminded him a lot of Makeda, sometimes … with the wit and understated ability to pierce through to the underlying topic, and the insistence on maintaining an even hand, even in a heated debate …

Abruptly Romani realises he’s comparing a half-demon to _another half-demon_ and buries his face in his hands to scream-laugh as quietly as he can.

Had that been on purpose? Had Merlin seen even that, Romani’s conversations with a half-human queen millennia ago?

Surely not. A lot of that era is nebulous to those who came after … it was so long ago.

Oh, but that means the scholars who condemned him for idolatry and demon-worship might actually be on to something there —!

That’s just too much. Laugh-crying, Romani shuts down his laptop and staggers back to his bed so he can flop and bury his face in a pillow.

Too much, really. And that doesn’t really solve the issue at hand. Could Romani talk to Merlin the way he’d talked to Magi*Mari? Well, yes! He can! He _had_! Mostly believing Merlin _was_ Magi*Mari, to be sure, but in Babylonia, those conversations had gotten pretty involved, while they tried to save a nation already doomed.

So, yes, sure, Romani can meet Merlin as an equal, talk about — everything.

But could he talk about nothing?

That’s less certain, and when Romani tries to imagine Merlin and him in a coffee-shop together, the way he’d imagined Magi*Mari, he snorts with laughter again. They’d wind up arguing, wouldn’t they? Probably. Arguing about magic, in broad daylight …

He’d never talked about magic with Magi*Mari, Romani realises with a funny little jolt of something that feels like disconcert and an excitable flutter all at once. He’d talked about it with Merlin, in Babylonia, while keeping an eye on Ritsuka and Mash, while figuring out their options —

… Come to think of it, Gilgamesh hadn’t exactly hid that he’d known even back then, any more than he had as an Archer. Romani really should have been able to tell that the cat had been out of the bag with _everyone_ , there. He’d spent so long worried Gilgamesh would say something, he’d forgotten to wonder much about Merlin past their first meeting.

“Well, that’s something,” he says aloud to the darkness of his room. Something he shared with Merlin, but not Magi*Mari. It’s — a weird thought, that.

Maybe the ‘nothing’ is something that’ll come with time. Maybe the domestics will, too — it’s hard to imagine cuddling up with Merlin in front of a laptop to watch dumb soapies. 

So, back to the sex and the tacit reminder Da Vinci had not said when she reminded him that Merlin is a man: that Merlin is also half-incubus. Sex has to be on the table. It wouldn’t be fair, otherwise; it’d be denying Merlin an intrinsic part of him. Romani has to be able to expect sex.

Just bringing his mind around to that particular topic makes Romani blush.

As hard as it had been trying to fantasise about Magi*Mari in a non-political-coupling context, after he’d gotten to know her — ostensibly — it had felt like … an imposition, almost, to try and use her as lust fodder. Like he’s some creepy nice guy trying to get under a woman’s skirt, by being friendly with them. No way.

But he does at least know how sex _works_ , and Merlin _is_ an incubus, so … it’s probably okay to at least try and imagine, right? To see if Romani could … tolerate it, anyway? He probably doesn’t _have_ to be super into it, if it’s something Merlin needs … he’s an incubus.

That’s probably approaching the ‘sex as a duty’ thing he’d had in his first life, but, well … Romani’s not trying to plan asking Merlin to marry him, here, just whether some measure of compatibility is _possible_.

Romani closes his eyes, sorts through his half-formed fantasies of Magi*Mari. He steers clear of that wonderful dream that makes his heart leap and his throat close, as having too many emotions associated with it. Other than that the easiest ones are the domestic ones, the ones where he imagined her being — here, in Chaldea, when he imagined them together just like this, with the lights down low and only one bed between them, speaking of those nothings while curled beside one another, not always clothed, sometimes just — skin to skin, all warm and _present_ , and not alone.

He consciously replaces that image with Merlin, imagining Merlin here next to him, close enough to touch …

The heat blooms in Romani’s face so fast and suddenly that it takes his breath away, and he rolls to bury his face in his pillow. All of a sudden, every part of his body is thrilling a warning, all fluttering anxiety. OKAY, well, that’s a difficult thing to imagine even outside the context of that dream, apparently!

But: he can imagine it. That’s a start, right?

Right. 

So, all those things, a collection of maybes laid to rest, and he’s still no closer to a decision …

Or maybe it just feels like that because he’s already made it. 

Because when he considers each of those things, piece by piece, against the heart-pounding potential of the unknown future —

He still wants to see what happens.

Even if it turns out that he can’t stand Merlin, really.

Even if it turns out that Merlin, at some point, does something _really_ stupidly aggravating and Romani decides he can’t handle it.

Even if it turns out the sex is terrible and there’s just no way Romani can give Merlin what he needs …

When Romani compares all those things to the idea of not even trying, of laying here night after night _wondering_ , wishing …

The thought of living the rest of his live wondering about things he hadn’t done is worse than the idea that they might find out to their detriment. 

And it’s a sleepy thought, by this point, but —

Romani is pretty sure that this is the feeling of wanting to try.

Sometime in the middle of these half-formed contemplations, he falls mostly-asleep, dozing with these considerations wobbling in and out of his dreams.

* * *

Romani wakes to the sound of his doorbell buzzing, and blinks groggily, rubbing his face and sitting up. “Yeah?”

He sounds about as groggy as he feels … oh, well. The door hisses open and Ritsuka bounces in, all cheer and _way_ too energetic for this time of —

Romani checks the clock. Oh, it’s not that early. Whoops.

“Da Vinci said you might need some help getting up this morning,” says Ritsuka brightly, “and also I’m under orders to tell you to wear.”

“Wear?” Romani repeats, still half asleep and befuddled, and taking far too long to remember that he’s in his pyjamas, in as far as pyjamas go when he _doesn’t have a sleeping shirt that fits —_

With a strangled noise Romani yanks up his sheets, and Ritsuka’s grin widens.

“C’mon, you’re wearing pants. What are you, a Puritan?”

“Hey!”

“Come on come on come oooooon,” she cajoles him, tugging lightly on his sheets. “The spa is heating, the chair is ready, the helpers are gathering — come on, Doctor Roman, it’s time to play with your hair!”

She’s so enthusiastic and anticipatory that Romani winds up laughing, even though he _really doesn’t want to_.

“Also, you have swimming trunks, right?” Ritsuka adds, going to his wardrobe. “I’m _pretty sure_ I saw something like that in here —”

“Hey,” Romani protests again, stuck between strangled objection and laughter.

“Here we go!” Ritsuka pulls back and tosses them to the bed. “You need to wear these. Da Vinci’s orders.”

“Da Vinci’s gotten a little too used to giving orders around here,” Romani grumbles, and eyeballs Ritsuka until she holds up her hands and turns around.

“You’d think I’ve never seen a man naked before,” she says, and Romani stops short in the middle of reaching for the swimming trunks.

“Ex _cuse_ me?” He can’t quite help the shocked scandal in his tone. When had _Ritsuka_ seen men naked? As far as he knows, she doesn’t even have a preference for men. Did something happen? Was there something he missed?

Ritsuka’s noise is part sigh, part laugh, all resignation. “Come on, Doctor Roman, the second Singularity was basically a pirate’s ship. There isn’t exactly much privacy there. And Blackbeard is, well …” Her voice sours. “… Blackbeard.”

The moment of his heart stopping is — terrible; and his mind flashes to Tamar, to all the things left undone, all the injustice perpetrated for the sake of inaction.

“… I’m going to kill him,” says Romani, “a _lot_.”

Ritsuka startles at his tone, half glancing behind her; and then she turns around again, and he’s not sure what’s in her tone as he changes, very quickly. “He’s never done — _that_ — I’m not sure he can, since I’m his Master, and all the Servant women can handle themselves.”

It’s a bare consolation, in the face of something Romani hadn’t known, hadn’t seen. He’s not going to make the same mistakes as he and David already have. He makes a mental note to check with Da Vinci on that, too.

“You know we _can_ get rid of him,” he says. “Just having a contract doesn’t mean it can’t be cancelled.”

Ritsuka shakes her head, her ponytail waving. “I know that. It just seems — too cruel, almost. I know he’s a terrible person, but … there’s a lot of ways to be a terrible person. Servants don’t usually get to stay summoned for this long. If he’s going to learn how to change, then … this is it. You know?”

… Oh.

For a moment the fierce warmth and pride is so strong as to be breath-taking. Romani finishes dressing in silence, spitefully finding one of his shirts to pull over his shoulders so he isn’t walking around only in shorts, and then goes to put his hands on Ritsuka’s shoulders and wrap her in a hug from behind. She lets out a startled noise, but then leans back with a sigh.

“I do know,” he says. “Some people can’t change, though. Or they don’t want to.”

Ritsuka squeezes his arm. “Yeah. I know. But as long as he toes the line, I figure we can keep the chance open. Anyway, we don’t stand for it, when he’s a scumbag.”

“Good.”

He’s still going to check with Da Vinci about just what Teach has been doing, and whether he needs to be worried about any of the non-Servant staff. Most of them are too old for Teach’s propensities … That makes it sound _worse_.

“Besides —” Ritsuka continues, and then stops and glances sidelong. “Um. Never mind.”

“David sometimes says things that are equally bad,” Romani says quietly.

“… Yeah,” says Ritsuka, equally soft. “He’s been hanging around me a lot the last couple of days, when I haven’t been with you. I think he wants to ask something — but he’s not sure how. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want things to stay how they were, between you. He just wasn’t sure how to approach while you’ve been, um, sad.”

Romani exhales into her hair, wonders at the entirely ambivalent combination of dampness in his eyes and tightness in his chest.

It still doesn’t sit well, and maybe he’s not the best person to judge. Or maybe he is, depending on how the others want to look at it. But Ritsuka has a point. If they’re going to start pick and choosing which Servants are palatable and which aren’t — on the purely practical side, there’s a lot of useful resources they’d lose, to cancel contracts with everyone who does something gross or terrible. And there’s a lot of opportunities that would be lost, if they start sending people like Teach or David away …

At the very least, he should look into some stricter behavioural regulations. Da Vinci may not have thought of it.

Even Heroic Spirits can change. That doesn’t mean they should be let to do or say whatever they want while they’re given the chance.

Romani squeezes Ritsuka’s shoulders a little. “Okay. Give me a few minutes? I’ll be right out.”

She cranes her head back, a beam written all over her face, moving from wearied child solder to happy teen in an instant. “Okay!”

Romani gives her a little push toward the door, watching until she’s gone, and then turns around to make use of the bathroom. On his way out, the rose is standing upright, its blossom opening even as he watches, shaking water off his hands.

He shakes his head, and tries not to smile. “Okay, okay.”

When he emerges from his room, rose around his wrist, Ritsuka is waiting in the hall, alone, back against the wall and kicking it idly with a foot. She hops up and grabs his sleeve the minute he’s out. “Okay, let’s go. Hey — you’re not wearing shoes? The environmental system’s not fixed, and the floor’s been the worst.”

“I don’t have any shoes that fit, remember?”

“You’re the father of magecraft, you can’t create yourself new shoes?”

… Busted. Romani’s smile is crooked and self-deprecating, and he has to resist the urge to hunch. “Sometimes I hated having to wear shoes.”

Ritsuka looks at him half-disbelievingly past her fringe, and then laughs and drags on his arm. “Sucks to be you if we walk through a cold path, then!”

“Excuse you, have some respect for your elders!”

“No way!”

Ritsuka talks at him happily the whole way to the recreation wing, and Romani is content to be distracted from the fact that he’s walking through Chaldea like he’s going to the beach, and all his tattoos are on display to the passersby. She promises food, which is good, because apparently he’s not going to be given the chance to eat, and frankly had absolutely forgotten in the process of being woken up.

She also fills him in on Mash, without Romani even having to ask. That fact makes his chest feel warm.

“She really wanted to come collect you too,” Ritsuka says as they arrive at the recreation wing, “but she’s on crutches, and I really think you should try and heal her or something because at this rate she’s gonna keep forgetting not to use her foot.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Romani promises, and it’s genuine. He hadn’t had room for it in his head last night — he hadn’t had room in his head for most things, last night — but the idea of being able to use his magic how he chooses, _finally_ , and to use it to heal …

He likes it.

“She does make this _adorable_ little squeak-and-pout whenever she forgets, though,” Ritsuka adds with the tiny smile Romani honestly isn’t sure she knows she wears, whenever she’s talking about Mash. He’s smiling so fondly that he almost doesn’t notice that they’re passing the gym, until the bright yellow of the tape catches his eye and he looks without thinking —

The lance of sudden grief is a sudden thrust which takes his breath away, and he might have stopped, if not for Ritsuka tugging on his hand. Oh, that’s unfair … for a few hours, he’d thought fighting with Gilgamesh had solved that problem.

“Come on, Doctor,” says Ritsuka, more kindly than a teenager strictly ought to, to someone his age; but his feet keep walking, because _Ritsuka_ keeps walking, and Romani manages to pull his gaze away.

Ritsuka links their arms together and keeps telling him about Mash’s pouts this morning, and doesn’t ask. Fierce gratitude wars with that unexpected ambush of regret, and Romani can’t find words; so he doesn’t. He just listens as Ritsuka’s voice is met by the sound of distant chatter, and then not-so-distant chatter, through the doors leading into the pool room.

“And we’re here!” Ritsuka shoves open the doors with a flourish, and even though Romani’s seen this room before — well, he’s not quite prepared for the … people. In it.

There’s, um, a lot more than he’d thought there would be, gathered around the raised area where the tub is. Jeanne seems to be _in_ the tub — Martha’s leaning over. There’s a chair pulled up somewhere by the edge, he thinks. Mozart and Tristan are arguing by one of the benches, oh boy. Astolfo rushes up to Leonidas by the ledge, arms full of bottles, oh _no_. There’s Enkidu — Romani scans the room in a half-dazed panic — no Gilgamesh that he can see, thank goodness. Nitocris’s ears bob past one of the taller Servants, joining Astolfo and Leonidas in their very intensive discussion about whatever’s in those bottles.

“Um …”

Ritsuka doesn’t let him dawdle here, either, and even though Romani can’t help but draw back, at least this time he manages to check himself and fall into step, instead of submitting to be yanked across the floor by a teenager. That would have been far too embarrassing.

Especially since Enkidu is apparently just reporting on his every movement to Gilgamesh. He’s not planning on having that conversation again for at least another century, if at all, thanks.

“I’ve got him,” Ritsuka announces cheerfully, and the bustle opens somewhat to let them in. So many people …

“Ah, there you are, Romani,” says Da Vinci with inappropriate cheer as she emerges from the bustle. “I see Ritsuka caught you before you dressed~”

Romani’s cheeks warm, and he glares, plucking at the swimming trunks. “This was your idea, I’m told?”

“Romani, please. We’re in the pool-room. What else should you be wearing?”

“I didn’t think I’d be getting into the tub …”

“Oh, you won’t be,” says Da Vinci brightly, and points to the chair beside the tub, with a headrest like those belonging to a chair in a hairdresser’s, all pillowed and comfortable. “But others will have to get into the tub to wash your hair. We thought it would be the most economical way. And, well, splashing happens, doesn’t it? Wearing something appropriate for swimming is only logical.”

“Why do I get the feeling that there’s something more than that happening,” Romani mutters, eyeballing Leonidas and his suspiciously glistening skin, and Da Vinci lays a hand over her heart.

“Romani Archaman, if, after all this time, you don’t _trust_ me …”

He shakes his head and holds up his hand in surrender. “Are you going to be cutting my hair in that chair too?”

“Yes and no,” says Da Vinci. “It’s a recliner, so it can sit up — so, yes, you won’t have to move. Unfortunately, if you wanted to see what I was doing, you’re out of luck. I didn’t have time to figure out a mirror.”

“That’s fine, that’s fine, that’s something I can handle.”

“Oh? Good.” She smiles at him, cat-canary pleased, and Romani suspects that mirrors may simply have been too boring for her to bother with if she could con him into taking care of it. “In that case, if you can make some part of that wall reflective, when we’re done with your hair we can simply sit you up and swivel the chair. Easy-peasy! Sometimes I impress even myself.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” says Ritsuka. “I mean, it’s _just_ a chair. Ever hair salon in every country everywhere has a dozen of _those_.”

Da Vinci turns toward her beatific smile with an equally beatific one of her own, and Romani pulls away laughing to lay a hand on that wall. He stands there a moment, contemplating the fond warmth in him, and the wall, and, in general, how much space is _actually_ needed to be a mirror, and the best way to harness glass without making all the wall a mirror …

Ah, gyms have mirrored walls all the time, don’t they? Romani rests his head against the steel and considers structural integrity, and heat, and condensation … hmmm. It might even be a good idea, at least in terms of reflective surfaces keeping the heat in. If it were another room he’d be wary about the humidity, but here …

“Become as glass,” he murmurs, in his mind reaching for the edges of the wall. It feels like a muscle unstretched, and not expecting to be. It’s a little thrill of an action, one he’s never before taken without the rings to supplant it. “Show our reflections, become that which shows the truth reversed … Mirror.”

Ah, he’ll need to get better at these off-the-cuff incantations … even when not pressed for time, he’s not as poetic as he could be. But: the wall shifts under his hand, turns reflective and open, like ceiling has opened up to reveal twice as much space. Behind him, there’s a few startled noises, and someone laughing, and Marie Antoinette squealing in delight.

“Ah! Wonderful! Now I can see myself no matter where I stand!”

“Show off,” says Da Vinci, but she sounds amused, and Romani draws back smiling.

“You asked for a mirror,” he says guilelessly. “You didn’t say how big you wanted it to be.”

Somewhere in the mingle, he hears Mash giggling, and Da Vinci huffs, hands on her hips, and points at the chair. “Take a seat, Archaman. You’re at my disposal for the morning.”

“I notice _you’re_ not in swimmers …” Romani mutters as he passes, and there’s Mash, sitting on a chair next to his with Fou purring on his back on her lap — near enough to see, to talk, to engage in everything happening, without being at risk of using her foot.

“Of course I’m not,” says Da Vinci with dignity. “I’m not the one who’s getting in the tub, or situated next to it. Mash?”

“Ready,” says Mash with a smile, setting down one last bottle Astolfo had just given her, and gently rubbing Fou’s stomach. Astolfo’s grin is more like a smirk and a wink as they whirl off, and Romani feels a distinct sense of foreboding.

“Excellent,” says Da Vinci briskly. “Romani, your shirt.”

“Whyyyy?” Romani asks suspiciously, and deliberately draws out the word.

“Because I doubt your magical circuits have received much attention in a while and we decided if we’re going to go your hair, we might as well extend that to a mani-pedi and some judicious massage.”

She smiles at him, shamelessly bright, and yep now Leonidas’s glistening muscles make _total_ sense. Of course they would go to a Spartan for massage oils. Of course.

Romani splutters, shaking his head and torn between laughing and running, and even as he complains pulling off his shirt. “ _Really_?”

“Come on, Romani,” Da Vinci cajoles him. “You must have suffered — ahem, excuse me, _delighted_ in this sort of attention all the time.”

“Not from the lot of you!”

“If it’s really uncomfortable, we can not do the other stuff, Doctor,” says Mash earnestly, her brow drawing together. “We just thought, well — after everything — maybe your magical circuits could use it. I read about massage therapy sometimes helping with this like minor blocks …”

… _Oh_. So that’s where they’d gotten the idea — someone had suggested it for Mash. And he can see why, someone without modern medical knowledge would make that hypothesis … they wouldn’t even be entirely wrong.

Entirely against his will, Romani’s face softens. If Mash is that worried, then … well, he can bear the — awkwardness — of all this if it gives Mash some peace of mind.

“Oh, all right … you’re not wrong, anyway, massage therapy is one of the first things magical doctors suggest if someone’s tense and been having trouble casting.”

Mash brightens. “Ah! See, Senpai?”

“I still say it’s just an excuse to luxuriate in attention,” says Ritsuka, and adds with bright cheer which is alarmingly similar to Da Vinci’s, “Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Sit down, Doctor. We’ve got you covered.”

“The lot of you are going to be the death of me,” Romani grumbles, and winces when Ritsuka punches his arm. “Ow.”

“Don’t even joke,” she says severely, and straightens up to look over their gathered posse of Servants. “Jeanne, are we ready in the tub?”

“We are, Master,” says Jeanne warmly from behind Romani’s head as he settles into the chair. He is _not_ going to admit it might be the most comfortable thing he’s ever sat in … he is _not_. But he can’t help but let out a little sigh of approval, and Da Vinci looks painfully smug as she turns toward the trolley to unpack her equipment and the many boxes stacked nearby. For his hair, no doubt.

“Ah, Doctor, the rose …” Ah, right. Before Romani can ask it to untwine, Mash’s hands cup it the flower, her face made of studious concentration. “Please?” She asks so nicely, the rose unwinds, and Romani watches her holding it like a fragile, precious thing, and his chest feels full and warm.

“Great,” says Ritsuka, grinning hugely with hands on her hips. “Then I declare Operation: Pamper Doctor Roman commenced!”


	15. Lift you up and fly away with you into the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A (belated) note on d'Eon's pronouns: Historically d'Eon actually did declare herself a woman and demanded recognition as such from the government, and I see no justifiable reason for FGO to have ignored that stated preference, so I'm going with she/her pronouns. (Autopsy did suggest intersex, which is probably why the game went with what it did, but d'Eon herself explicitly declared herself a woman and she's the only one who has a right to say so.)

‘Pampering’ might be too tame a word, Romani considers sometime later, once his many, many braids have been carefully unbound, exclaimed over, and finally lowered into the tub. It’s true, he’s experienced this sort of thing all the time — but from the perspective of it being his due, of being a king, and not even really thinking about it or questioning the difference.

Here, these people, most of whom are Servants, still aren’t his _servants_ , and it should feel awkward, it _does_ feel awkward …

But it also feels warm, too, in ways he had given up hoping to have. That these people should choose to gather like this, for this purpose —!

Perhaps some of it is simply searching for something to do. But there are things they could have chosen other than this.

At first Romani’s tense for it, at the oddity — the knowledge of people around him while he is idle. It’s not a comfortable feeling anymore, if it ever should have been to begin with; but moment by moment, Romani manages to relax, in the wash of conversation, in the presence of Mash and Ritsuka on either side.

“Senpai, you really can go into the tub if you want …”

“And leave you alone to miss out? No way. We can both help from here, it’s fine. The more people combing, the better, anyway.”

“Thank you, Senpai.”

Romani dares to peek, to see Mash’s blushing face aglow with gratitude — and other things. Ah, he’s really going to have to schedule a conversation with them both after this … it’s too bad he can’t just schedule something now, he’ll probably forget later. Maybe Da Vinci will help him remember.

Bu he can’t ask, like this, with so many people around, and that thought is also soon forgotten. For the most part he says nothing, only listens. The frustrated exclamations about knots in his hair aren’t new; the gossip is. He remembers — well, he’d been one of the senior staff, with only other senior staff to gossip with, and fewer as time went on. As a king, who would dare?

But here the people talk without a care, cursing slightly over a tangled brush or yelping over a suddenly-discovered wet patch on the floor; complimenting Amadeus and Tristan in turns, discussing the last Singularity and who fought whom last in the gym … Oh, the gym. 

It takes Romani a solid five minutes to realise that Astolfo is talking about it, their voice pitched low but not low enough to avoid drawing his attention past the rest; and not only the gym, but who would beat whom in a fight.

“Obviously it would be the King of Mages,” Astolfo says, just a little loud before someone shushes them. “He already did once.”

“Gilgamesh was obviously baiting him,” Enkidu says. “He would have won, if not for that.”

“So you’re saying the King of Heroes would lower himself to hold _back_?”

“No, Gilgamesh would not hold back …”

“Well, then, which is it?”

“There’s other goals than simply trying to defeat a person.”

Romani doesn’t realise his grimace is showing until Ritsuka sits up and calls over. “Hey, Astolfo, where’s that moisturiser?”

“Oh, right! Sorry, Master!”

“Senpai, I have all the moisturisers here,” says Mash quietly.

“Really? Oops.”

Ritsuka’s tone is nothing but innocence, and Romani laughs softly, not quite as under his breath as he means it to be. It’s an odd kind of assurance, an odd kind of safety, that these people would try to protect him even from accidentally cutting words …

It’s a little easier to relax after that. Even Fou hops up on Romani’s lap, circles, and settles.

It’s especially easy when his hair has been unbraided, combed, and finally declared time to put in the water, and the washing begins. Romani can’t help but melt a little into the chair as the weight of his hair is finally taken off him, as the water damps his scalp. He hadn’t quite realised how itchy it’d been getting … maybe he should be paying better attention to himself, honestly.

It gets better when Jeanne finds the tension he’s been carrying somewhere at the base of his skull and kneads it away with infinitely gentle fingers, and that’s honestly just _unfair_.

“Is that better, Your Majesty?” she asks from overhead, unseen because somewhere along the line Romani’s eyes have closed.

“Mmm …”

Mash and Ritsuka giggle madly and Romani does not even care. 

“Don’t be afraid to fall asleep, Romani,” says Da Vinci, sounding very amused. “Don’t think I don’t remember what time it was when you went back to your room last night, and I really doubt you got much rest after that.”

Romani mostly just manages another hum in response to that. It’s true; he’s sleepy. And although he doesn’t _really_ intend to doze, it’s hard _not_ to. Time starts wavering in and out, the voices around him skipping between being in sharp focus and being a hum in the background, while he’s groggy with warmth and safety.

He remembers, vaguely, Tristan and Amadeus arguing softly; remembers a medley of music growing louder until someone shushes them both, that they’ll wake the doctor if they keep going on like that … 

He remembers vaguely thinking _Oh, that’s me_ , and then time sliding away from him again.

He remembers a quiet tune which sounds more familiar than Tristan’s harp or Amadeus’s violin, remembers thinking _I didn’t know they knew anything from Israel_ ; remembers, in the next moment, wondering who that voice is and not quite pairing youthful tones with the deeper, more wearied voice of his father from the memories of his childhood. Even in sleep, he pauses to listen to that, only to that, until time weaves away again.

When Leonidas comes closer, Romani stirs a little, the cold touch of fingers on his limbs a surprise even half asleep.

“Shhh, it’s okay, Doctor,” Mash whispers, and, well, if Mash is saying it, it’s probably true — maybe —

“Go back to sleep, we’re just looking at your magical circuits,” says Ritsuka, and if they’re in agreement he supposes he can probably not try to get up for a while …

Even still he slits one eye half open, just to be sure, because there are definitely a couple more people gathered than there had been, and Leonidas’s voice rumbling somewhere nearby, instructing someone on — something about muscles — let’s be honest, that’s not unusual with Leonidas …

Someone kneads his hands, and _oh_ , that’s heavenly … he’d forgotten what he could put his hands through, without even magic involved. He’s aware of letting out a sigh, relaxing more into the chair under him, and Ritsuka giggling quietly somewhere distantly close-by.

“I think we’re probably good … who’s on foot duty?”

“It would be my honour to serve, Master,” says Martha, and even her voice doesn’t stir much alarm in Romani beyond _Oh that’s right, she’s here_. Something by his feet scrapes and then one by one they’re set into a basin of water, and Romani sighs again. He can’t remember the last time someone tended his feet …

He’d forgotten some of these creature comforts had been actually comforting. Or maybe he simply hadn’t known until he’d had to go without them, until he’d had the chance to revisit them in his own body without the strains of responsibility burdening him. It’s hard to tell what was to his taste and what wasn’t, from his first life, when so much of it had been under the dominion of obedience.

This might be worth it just for knowing what else he enjoys, divested of kingship, divested of anything but the willingness of people to offer.

… He might be getting maudlin, in his half-sleep …

“Doctor? Are you awake?”

He hears Mash’s hushed voice, but the idea of responding comes very slowly; so slowly that Ritsuka answers before he does.

“He’s out like a light. Da Vinci, why didn’t he get much sleep last night? He seemed pretty good yesterday …”

“Ah, he asked me for some details about what he missed, that’s all. It gave him some things to think about. Now, where are those boxes — ah, thank you, Georgios.”

“It is my honour, Lady Da Vinci.”

“Do you think we have enough? He has so much more hair than I remember …”

“I think we’ll be okay, Mash, we got extras just in case. I think it’s going to drag on the floor while he’s in the chair, though.”

“Why, Ritsuka, I’m offended you thought my genius couldn’t account for such a thing.”

“Senpai … look at the doctor.”

“What’s up?”

“He’s smiling.”

 _Oh, am I?_ is a fuzzy thought, and Romani has just enough awareness to examine himself from inside the groggy warmth of his body, just enough to tell that, yep, he sure is smiling in his sleep, how about that. Then he closes his mental eyes and doesn’t hear Ritsuka’s answer.

He’s not aware again until the sounds have changed around him, until the chatter is lower than it was; not whispered but _less_ , and the music is more distant, save for one lone instrument still nearby. His hair is — more of a weight than it was, and wet, and the click of buttons flipping strikes something close enough to an alert in him that Romani nudges past grogginess just enough to take a breath.

“Ah, good timing,” says Da Vinci, but hushed. “Romani?”

“Mh …”

“Well, good enough. We’re about to dry your hair, so don’t be alarmed by sudden noises.”

“Mh.”

It’s still abrupt, the sound of a dozen hair-dryers going at once, enough to make Romani stir with a breath and peel his eyes open just a little before Ritsuka’s hand covers them.

“Shh. It’s okay, Doctor, you don’t need to wake up yet. I think this will take a while.”

“He’s as fluffy as Fou,” says Mash, sounding absolutely delighted, so much that Romani feels a pang of regret that they’re about to cut most of it off.

“kyu …” On Romani’s lap, a fluffy form stirs, stretches, and settles again.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of kids happy with getting such fluffy hair for their wigs, don’t you, Senpai?”

“Definitely,” says Ritsuka, and the smile in her voice is audible. “Look at it all … oh, well. Maybe we can talk him into growing it out slowly again.”

“Mngh.”

Romani’s grunted objection makes them both break into mad giggles, and he lays there listening, smiling on the inside and possibly on the out, until the weight of his hair alleviates and the dyers shut off.

“I think we’re done,” says Jeanne, her voice sounding clear like a bell in the contrasting silence. “Does that feel about right to you, Master?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never cut hair before … Da Vinci?”

“That should do it. Romani, are you still awake, or did you drop off again?”

“M’wake,” Romani mumbles, and giggles resound.

“Try again more believably this time,” says Da Vinci, sounding amused. “I guess you don’t have to be, but only if you don’t mind someone else choosing the length of your hair for you.”

— Oh. Right. They’re at this part, are they?

Romani stirs and it’s a monumental effort. All of his muscles are limp and gooey, warm and relaxed in a way which makes movement a grudging thing. He does manage to at least open his eyes, blinking and squinting up at the lights, and Ritsuka’s grinning head hovering over him.

“Good morning,” she says cheerfully, and looks up. “It’s still morning, right?”

“Just barely, Senpai. Emiya said he was planning on doing something extra for lunch.”

“Oh, right, the knights and some of the Celts were holding a poker morning for a bunch of the old-new staff, huh? Well, if they get catering, so should we.”

“Agreed,” says Da Vinci. “Alright, Romani, I’m about to raise the chair. Brace yourself~”

Romani is still blinking grogginess away as the chair rises, the back lifts, and he doesn’t have to move one inch to be seated properly upright. “Ritsuka, can you get the wheel lock under there — yes, that’s the one. Alright, and moving toward the mirror, please.”

“… This is really embarrassing,” Romani manages even as he moves, and he can’t quite see who’s pushing except one of them has to be Ritsuka and another might be Jeanne, given the soft, gentle chuckle.

“Ah, Your Majesty, please let us perform this service,” she says, somewhere over and behind his head. “It is an opportunity for those of us to gather who would, and offer you something as our thanks.”

 _None of you would have had to do anything if it weren’t for me_ is definitely a thought Romani thinks; but he manages to swallow it from reaching air, and lets out a breath of a laugh. “Ah, when you put it like that …”

“Doctor, your hair is _really long_ ,” says Ritsuka, sounding offended and wistful at once. “Da Vinci, it’s still dragging the ground a little.”

“Hm. Well, one more notch up shouldn’t be much trouble … there.”

Romani blinks down at Da Vinci at his elbow, and he’s definitely a significant distance above her — as much as he would be were they standing side-by-side, if not more. She throws a towel over him, wraps it business-like around his shoulders and tugs it off Fou’s curled-up form where it falls on him, and finally rests her chin on Romani’s shoulder to look at him in the mirror. He looks back, silent under her scrutiny; and he can see, now, what’s happening around him in the mirror’s reflection. Mash’s chair has scooted this way, and Ritsuka is next to her. Jeanne smiles at him and turns toward the tub, to help Martha and Enkidu clean the water and direct the gathering of tools scattered around.

More distant still, a significant part of the Servants no longer needed have opted to take advantage of the pool at large, and this is why the music is more distant than it had been — Tristan and Amadeus have taken their musical battle to the other side of the room, where they won’t disturb Romani but can still be heard by anyone who cares to listen.

It isn’t only Servants in the room, either. There are some perfectly human staff here, mingling with the rest.

For a few brief moments Romani is too overcome with warmth and affection to do more than sit there and marvel, his heart in his throat.

“Hmmm.” Da Vinci taps his shoulder. “How long do you want it to be, Romani?”

He clears his throat, and even still, his voice is soft when he speaks. “I was thinking about the length it was before, to be honest …”

Mash lets out a tiny disappointed squeak, and Ritsuka sighs. “All that hair … Oh, well. The kids, Ritsuka, think of the kids.”

Romani’s laugh is a little wry, and Mash giggles.

“Ah, we’ve arrived on time,” says d’Eon from somewhere past the chair, and in the mirror Romani sees her approach, arms full of ribbons, and Marie Antoinette in her swimmers walking along behind, gathering up the ends that threaten the floor.

“We thought they might be a nicer gift were they wrapped in ribbons,” says Marie cheerfully.

“We’re going to need more than that for the boxes,” says Ritsuka.

“Not for the boxes, Master,” says d’Eon, “for the hair-bunches. It will be a beautiful sight, for them to open the boxes and find the hair already ribboned, no?”

“… You’ve all put a lot of thought into this.” Ah, Romani’s cheeks are hurting again.

“Of course we did,” says Da Vinci briskly, and with a wink in the mirror. “This is the only chance we get to play with your hair. Okay, Ritsuka, you’re helping me with tools, right?”

“Ready!”

“Why don’t we start small,” says Da Vinci, picking up her scissors and scooping up the length of hair that, even now, habitually falls over Romani’s shoulder, across his collarbone. It’s shorter than the rest, coming from his nape, just behind his ear; still longer than he’d worn it reborn.

“Here, Romani, tell me how long, and I’ll measure the rest against this one. Okay?”

She puts the scissors horizontally over the the length of hair and slides them up until Romani says, “There.”

Da Vinci hums. “Ah, that’s not too bad. Still nothing like it is now, of course. Honestly, you could do with a trim anyway, I hate to think what kinds of split ends you might have gotten from that Singularity — hm.” Even as she speaks she measures the length, applies scissors — frowns. Romani is watching her, not what she’s doing; but he feels the tug against his nape which makes deja vu a distant looming thing. “Strange. Ritsuka, another pair of scissors, please?”

“Huh? Oh — sure.”

Scissors are exchanged, and _now_ Romani is watching what she’s doing, how she applies the scissors to snip the length of hair and the fact they simply don’t cut.

“Well,” says Da Vinci, sounding a bit startled, a bit miffed, “it looks like at least part of your hair doesn’t want to cut, Romani.” She tries again anyway, and the tug calls deja vu more acutely, the sort that heralds something more clairvoyant, enough that Romani’s breath catches and he wonders whether it will, in fact, follow through.

“I donn’t suppose there’s anything you did to your hair in-between, Romani?”

“No, I …”

There it is: a sweeping thing of subtle colour in the mirror, of reflections and sounds turning from where he is now to _where he’d been_. It’s not a vision, but it is: a memory more than some unfettered thing, something intimately entwined with him rather than simply something of the world thrown in his face.

_Solomon leans over the map, conscious of the height of it and the footstool beneath him, and its integrity against the floor should he lean any more. His braid swings from shoulder to dip against the pieces on the map, and absently he shakes it back, reaching for the small still figures that represent Israel’s forces._

We are the rebels _, they whisper at him, but a lot of inanimate objects whisper at him, when he bothers to make them mean something._

_The sound of the door opening brings his head up, and the doorway is limned by rainbows, for an instant webbed like stained glass; but the only person who walks through is Nathan, his pace a little slower than it was, and robes not nearly colourful enough to be a vision._

_Solomon sighs, and looks down at the pieces he sets into place. “Ah, it’s only you, Nathan.”_

_Nathan’s footsteps halt and then move toward the chair by the table, by rights a little_ too _large to stand on. Solomon isn’t so small as that anymore._

_“You were expecting someone else, my prince?”_

_“_ _Mhm_ _.” Carefully, carefully, Solomon nudges the piece a fraction to the side, and reaches for another, his attention on the map. It’s parchment, but it’s tinted rainbow, and he can see where it was: the roll of hills, the scrub; the battle of men falling … his next piece, he lays on its side._ _“There’s a man who’s been looking for me. I’ve seen him watching while I dream.”_

_His dreams are more confusing than waking, full of colour and voices in languages he doesn’t understand, and the wash of an ocean he can’t tell whether is real or just true. Surely so much water can’t exist in one place?_

It does _, is a whisper of an assurance. Maybe one day he’ll see it, not in a dream._

_“A man, my prince?”_

_… Oh, right._

_“Yes,” says Solomon, and he’s trying to pay attention to the conversation, honestly — but beneath him is a battlefield, and on the edges of his awareness there’s the knowledge that, somewhere, that man is reaching. “Lately I’ve been seeing him around the halls, so I think he’s getting close; but I don’t quite know what he wants yet.”_

_“I am sure the Voice of the Lord will tell you soon, my prince.” Nathan’s tone is even and absolute with faith, and for a moment rings so clear that rainbows turn gold and they feel a little painful, and Solomon leans on the table to steady himself until vertigo passes._

_“Of course.”_

_It always does._

_“Is there nothing else you know about him, my prince?”_

_The battlefield is fading from hills and blood to parchment, marked and pinned only by brass figurines. Solomon looks up, chewing his lip thoughtfully as he gazes out the window across from him, searching for words as well as memories._

_“He’s a demon. I know that.” To his side, Nathan stirs, but Solomon doesn’t look to him; only goes on. “I don’t believe he has ill intent at heart. Demon — but he felt human, too. He’s been looking for me from across a … a very great distance. I think we might have met, once. Or — will, sometime.”_

_The light in the window is doing something, shading in ways that might seem like sunlight through clouds but aren’t, because Solomon has long since learned how to tell when pointing out shapes will get him odd looks instead of understanding. This is something he has seen before, again and again, framed in gold and with a whisper of promise, and a cloud in the shape of a throne._

_“Before the throne, I think. The throne from which all spirits come …”_

_He’s barely aware that he’s speaking, he feels so far away from his body; like he sometimes does, when he’s seeing_ this _, stuck between two great distances. He hears the creak of Nathan leaning forward and it brings him back, enough that the light in the window dissipates. Solomon shakes his head, massages his temple with the heel of his palm, and leans on the map, studying the lines that represent the roads of Israel._

_“A demon, my prince?” Nathan prompts, gentle but consternated, and Solomon can’t help but smile a little. Even a prophet like Nathan fears._

_“Weren’t all demons angels once, Nathan?”_

_There’s that creak again. Someone really ought to fix that chair … but if they did, Solomon wouldn’t have something in the here and now to remind him someone is there. Maybe he won’t mention it, just yet._

_The map is just a map. Solomon examines it, brow furrowed, searching for the colours that had been there. He’d been looking at that … where had it gone?_

_“O holy prophet,” one of the guards murmurs by the door. “The Queen Mother requests your insight.”_

_“My prince?”_

_“Mm.” Solomon waves Nathan off and reaches for one of the pieces, and just like that the map is once more suffused with detail and depth, and he’s barely aware of Nathan’s footsteps moving off, and the quiet thud of the door pulled shut behind._

_For a few moments, there is nothing but whispers and the light in the map. Then everything draws taut, and Solomon pauses with one hand lifted, watching the way rainbows drain from black ink, the way all the shadows pull toward the door through which Nathan had just left; and all the background voices in Solomon’s hearing stand still._

“The Grand Caster has come.”

_It’s not just one voice, but many; and even those that speak something else are background, highlighting the accord with which all the others sound. They do so in a rush of fragrance and light which makes the floor ripple with a bed of flowers, and the doors open._

_This time there’s no web of might-be-light; this time there’s a hall behind, one which doesn’t belong to the palace and stretches endlessly into the distance, for all that the golden throne on the other end of it seems so close that Solomon can see the engravings upon it._

_The figure in the doorway is like an inverse silhouette, a shape with long hair and petals in ears, of staff in hand and tablet under arm, and robes that drift; and where light moves, it frames horns that aren’t quite there, and wings that might not be at all._

_“Oh, hello.” Solomon straightens, his heart pounding slow in the way it does when exciting things are happening, but he knows it will be fine. His smile feels a little distant … that’s sad. He would have liked it to be a little closer, this time. “It’s you. There you are.”_

_“It’s me!” says the Grand Caster, an echoing thing of many voices, threaded with a whispering backdrop which highlights distance and power, gravity and cheer. It’s both male and female, something in-between; but it seems to fall just barely on the first rather than the second. “Can I have what I’m looking for, please?”_

_His words make the rainbows ripple, a curtain of colours instead of the single golden accord that had been drawn to announce him, and on it a whisper of ‘I don’t know who you’re seeing, but it’s fine’._

_… Oh. Maybe the Grand Caster doesn’t know what he’s here for, either? Solomon regards him gravely, at the rainbows shifting around him and turning his hair like mother-of-pearl, and all the tiny ghostly figures of might-have-_ _beens_ _._

_“You don’t know who I mean you are, do you?” he asks after a moment, and the pang in his chest is so dulled, he can’t tell what it is. “It’s all right. I see you. Here.”_

_His hand lifts almost of its own accord, without his knowing quite what’s needed; but that’s okay. The rainbows do._

_He feels his lips move, the command which is a golden bell of a sound twined into intent —_ Cut _._

_His braid falls away and Solomon catches it, his limbs suddenly feeling heavier and heart racing harder than before; and he takes a breath, and looks up at the Grand Caster, holding out this piece of him._

Give it to him, _he’s told, a gentle silver whisper of assurance._ Give it to him and all will be well _._

_And even now Solomon can see — how offering this part of him twines rainbows together to golden accord, as if all along his braid is the colour missing from the rainbow to make it unified. It takes his breath away, makes his limbs feel trembly and weak, like they do when there’s this much power running through him and he’s not sure where it’s going._

_But: it’s going where it’s needed, where his Lord has commanded, and surely that means it’s okay._

_“You have everything you need, Grand Caster,” he says, and it’s not only him saying it, but all the whispers in the earth which direct him, speaking with his voice._

_The Grand Caster reaches out to take his braid, and all that had been rainbow shines gold. The throne behind him flashes, blinding even to Solomon, and as he blinks away the dazzle in his eyes the throne, the Grand Caster, the hall — they all fade like so many motes in a ray of sun, and rainbows wash across the room in a sigh, released._

_Nathan strides through the door, glancing at it with a furrowed brow; and Solomon sees the moment he registers that the door had been closed as he left, sees the falter in his step._

_“Is — all well, my prince?”_

Is it? _Solomon silently asks all the voices surrounding him._ Is all well?

 _There is no alarm, no sense of action needed. All_ must _be well._

_“Yes,” he says at last, and realises he’s fingering the threads where his braid had been. He turns toward the map, a little jerking, a little dazed; but recovering better than he used to. “He came. He’s gone now. I think I gave him what he needed.”_

_He can feel Nathan staring, in the way the hair on the back of his neck stands up. It’s a familiar stare; the stare of someone suffering a chill fit to take their breath, of someone almost-witnessing a miracle and yet feeling it brush past, and not knowing what or why. And he can feel Nathan’s intent forming in the rainbow light, a lance pointing toward the future as if faith is its own path._

This is the man who will be king.

_“Please don’t say that with your outside-voice, Nathan,” says Solomon mildly and without looking over as he picks up the piece he’d dropped to greet the Grand Caster. “I don’t think my brothers would approve.”_

_Nathan’s laughter is a soft, wondering thing, and that too is familiar._

_“… As you wish, my prince.”_

“Romani? _Romani_.”

Colours fade slowly in the mirror and Romani is vaguely aware of a hand on his shoulder, a concerned voice in his ear; but there’s still the scent of figs and frankincense in his nose, still heat on his skin and cool breeze through the window.

“Ah, I wasn’t sure I’d see that face again …”

“David? What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t be afraid, Master. That’s how he always looked when he was caught in a vision. You would think he isn’t listening, and then he turns and says something he could not possibly have known … sometimes without any tact at all.”

David’s voice rings wistful, and Romani can _see_ the moment of a different memory ready in the colours of the mirror. But —

No. He doesn’t want to see that. He doesn’t _have_ to, surely, if they’re both thinking on it anyway …

The rainbows fade and when Romani breathes in this time he’s smelling rose and lavender, salt and the sharpness of chlorine. Ritsuka looks anxiously at him in the mirror, his hand in hers, and Da Vinci’s brow is furrowed and unsmiling, also focussed on his reflection.

Behind them both, David smiles at him, small and wistful and a little sad, and his fingers move on the strings of his kinnor until the soft, simple melody chases away the last of the colours from that memory.

“I’m okay,” Romani manages, and it takes a bit; his tongue feels heavy in his mouth. He shakes his head fractionally, takes a deeper breath, and squeezes Ritsuka’s hand. “I’m okay … really.”

“What did you see?” Mash asks, anxious from lower down, on the edge of her chair like someone’s had to press her into it to stop her from rising.

“Ah … it was a memory, not a vision. It’s okay.” Romani manages a smile, but it’s the empty idle one he’d used to wear; and that’s almost worse than not smiling at all, so he puts it away, very quickly. “Leonardo — please cut my hair to the length of the part which won’t cut.”

“Are you certain?” Da Vinci asks, measuring out the length of it with a frown. It comes down to his chest; a far cry from floor-length, but still more than just past his shoulders. “That’s a decent amount of length to add on … well, nothing like it is now, of course.”

“It would look strange if that was the only part that was longer, wouldn’t it?” Romani asks, very reasonably, despite the way his heart is pounding.

Ah, have he and Merlin always been stepping in circles around each other, without even knowing …? Maybe so.

But if even then, Merlin could have reached through time and space to ask him in his youth, before kingship, for the means to save himself —

Romani’s heart feels warm and tight, and he can once more feel that choice looming, in those moments of seeing something he had long forgotten. Maybe it’s a stupid choice. Maybe nothing about it will work out.

But maybe it will.

And if it does …

He can hardly bear to think.

Da Vinci hums. “Well … it probably would. And it’s a better length to work with, for — those who like playing with other people’s hair.”

“So, you, then?” Romani asks, and grins small at her dazzling, shameless smile.

“But of course, Romani. Very well. Let me see how this will cut. Hmm … you have enough that I can do both foot-long and two-feet bunches. Some children love longer hair.”

She scrapes up his hair, reaching for the trolley on which she’d placed her equipment. David steps back, to the edge of Romani’s vision, taking the seat Romani hadn’t seen between tub and mirror to strum his fingers across the strings of his kinnor and hum.

Romani closes his eyes again, to listen to Da Vinci’s easy imperiousness asking her Master for tools, to feel Mash’s fingers curl around his, and listen to Marie and d’Eon discuss the best way of packaging hair-bunches for the children … and, behind them, the low hubbub of people enjoying themselves in the water, people living and dead and reborn and re-summoned —

Resurrected.

Like him.

… Does Merlin get to see these moments? Does he wish he could be here, with these people, among them, instead of trapped where he is?

Romani’s heart squeezes, and he sets the thought aside to instead bask in all this, for as long as he can. Mash’s fingers leave his, with a small pat for his knuckles and Fou still on his lap. He listens to Da Vinci humming between asking Ritsuka for tools; listens to David’s music, to Marie instructing d’Eon and Mash how to tie the ribbons, to the splash and laughter further back.

Bit by bit, the weight of his hair subsides, until Romani feels almost light-headed for the lack of it. 

“You’re pretty good at this, Da Vinci-chan,” says Ritsuka.

“Of course; I am a genius, after all! I think that’s all the length we have. How did we do, Marie?”

“I believe we have enough boxes,” Marie announces, “ _just_. Ah, such lovely hair … surely the children will be delighted! My dear Chevalier — another ribbon, please!”

“I am at your disposal, my queen.”

“Excellent,” says Da Vinci, and taps Romani’s shoulder as he opens his eyes. “Ah, I’m not done yet, Romani. I need to trim what I’ve just done. Nearly there, and then we can all invade the kitchen for lunch.”

“Oh, good,” says Ritsuka. “I’m _starving_. Scissors?”

“Patience, Ritsuka, patience.”

Mash, leaning on David’s arm, comes to sit by Romani again, and take his hand with a smile. David glances between Romani and the hair in the boxes behind — a veritable mountain of them, neatly fitted with tissue paper. David hums, glancing back.

“To be honest, I almost expected it to change colour once it was cut.”

“Why’s that?” Ritsuka asks, glancing over even as she rearranges the trolley, and David laughs.

“Ah, Master, you didn’t think white hair is a natural colour in Israel, did you? The moment he was born, we knew it was a symbol of Elohim’s blessing … It was how _I_ knew.”

 _That I had been forgiven,_ rings unsaid. Something in Romani’s chest rebounds off the inside of his ribs and into his throat, and Mash reaches up to take his hand in _both_ of hers. … Ah, his is trembling; that would be why.

“Of course it wouldn’t change colour when cut, Your Majesty,” Mash says, very seriously, answering David but looking at Romani in the mirror with such open earnestness that he can’t look away. “After all, blessings are meant to be shared, aren’t they?”

The hardness in Romani’s throat dissolves under simple, warm affection, so great and overwhelming that it still takes his voice — but at least for the right reasons.

David hums again. “Ah … yes, that is true, isn’t it? Thank you for the reminder, Ab —” Romani’s eyes narrow in the mirror. David catches the habitual name in his throat, coughs, clears it, and wanders back to his seat, with enough grace to at least look chagrined. “Ah, Mash. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Mash softly, but it’s Romani she’s still looking at in the mirror, and it’s Romani’s hand she’s holding. She continues to hold it, while David resumes his playing, while Da Vinci works around the new edges of Romani’s hair, and even when Da Vinci straightens with a satisfied noise.

“There. Done. Take a look now, Romani?”

Romani drags his eyes away from Mash’s smile to look at himself in the mirror, for possibly the first time since the chair had been moved. Like this, even with towel across his shoulders, he looks — well. He looks like the king. The chair hides everything else. Romani sits up and Fou stirs with a disgruntled noise, setting chin back on paws when it proves Romani isn’t actually rising. Da Vinci produces a hair-tie to put into Romani’s hand as he reaches up to gather his hair together.

— He can’t look. Romani closes his eyes to put his hair in its tail, despite that it’s stupid; his heart is pounding anyway, and just reminding it that it’s stupid to feel so nervous about this isn’t going to make it stop. He’s acutely aware of his hair’s length, like this, that it takes longer to pull through the tie —

But that he _can_ , which is more than he could have an hour ago.

And then his hair is tied, and there’s really nothing else to do but exhale, and open his eyes, and look at himself in the mirror.

“Ah.” Da Vinci rests her chin on his shoulder, and smiles. “There you are, Romani~”

Yes. There he is; browner than he was, and tattooed, and eyes ambivalent between gold and green —

There he is, with the more delicate jaw and throat, with a little of the gangliness returned, and his face perceptibly narrower now it’s no longer hidden by hair; and his bangs finer, fluffier things, instead of the thick wings that had always seemed more regally severe than gentle. It softens his face considerably. So that’s what Da Vinci had been doing around his front.

This might just be —

The best of both worlds.

“You look great, Doctor,” Ritsuka declares, and sneaks a look sideways. “Though you could probably do other things with your hair than just putting it in a ponytail all the time, y’know …”

“A bun,” says Mash at once.

“A _braid_ ,” Ritsuka objects, and Romani can’t resist the laughter, doesn’t resist the laughter, even as they argue over his chair and Da Vinci, smiling mischievously, tugs the end of his tail.

“Ah, Romani. It’s good to see you. Welcome home — again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we have it. Thank you all for your enthusiasm -- Makari and I are both really enjoying this series, and thrilled by the response.
> 
> We both have other works available [over here](https://aurichalcumpublishing.com/), too, in case anyone needs the boost between instalments of us shoving dumb immortal men at each other.


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